Google Adwords Automatically Opts You Into iPhone Advertising
Google today announced that Adwords now has the option to target customers on mobile devices such as the iPhone and G1 which offer HTML rendering of web pages. Specifically they state:
To target ads for G1 and iPhone, go to your campaign settings tab in your AdWords account. Then for the “Device Platform” option under “Networks and Bidding,” select “iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers.” As additional devices that use full browsers enter the market, your ads will show on those phones, too. You can visit the AdWords Help Center for more detailed instructions and watch my video below for a quick demo. If you currently have an AdWords campaign running, by default your campaign will show ads on desktop and laptop computers, as well as iPhone and G1.
I have an iPhone, use it everyday and love it. I’m also an active Adwords advertiser and love the functionality that this offers, but don’t like the fact that I was automatically opted in with no notification of it occurring. Had I not been a blog reader this could have gone unnoticed until I looked at campaign settings. Here is a screenshot of what you’ll receive upon logging into your account:
Notice that the iPhone is automatically checked upon login. This is great if you have a particular client/site that it would work for. You do need to keep in mind that if you have flash on your landing page that the iPhone won’t render it properly and that e-commerce or lead generation may be difficult on such a small device. In that case those sites may want to create iPhone sites such as Walmart which automatically detects your browser and serves up a user experience unique to that phone. I see this as a great tool for local business ads, movies, or other brand awareness type of campaigns. My recommendation would be to create a separate campaign for the iPhone and see how it performs to be able to accurately measure the effectiveness of this form of advertising.
How To Pick A SEM Agency: Part 1 Search Engine Marketing
When picking a agency to manage your SEM (search engine marketing) you need to take into account more than just if they know Google Adwords. Today there are a multitude of factors that you need to consider to get a complete experience when it comes to your online marketing. We’ll be publishing all of the components that go into your strategy in the order listed below. The first of five part series will focus on SEM itself, but I want to stress that the other four components are very important as you look at a comprehensive strategy for Online Marketing.
- Search Engine Marketing
- Web Analytics
- A/B and MVT Testing
- Landing Page Optimization
- Online Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Today Google owns roughly 70% market share, Yahoo 20%, Microsoft 5% and Ask 5%. These numbers constantly change, but your agency should know that a comprehensive strategy encompasses more than just Google. Different search engines produce different conversion rates across different verticals. Your product could work better in Yahoo than Google, so ensure that your agency tests them out to see which performs better.
You also want to see what services are included in your contract. Services vary greatly by agency or consultant. Some are bundled as packages, others claim to do ‘everything’. What you need to ensure is that everything is spelled out ahead of time so that nothing is left to chance. Some basic services include:
- Keyword Research
- Account Setup
- Geotargeting
- Dayparting
- Negative Keywords
- Ad Creation
- Content Network Research
- Conversion Tracking Implementation
- Account Management
- Reporting
Other services may be more complex, depending on if your agency or consultant needs include integrating with existing APIs, database or inventory management, web analytics tracking, etc. This will need to be discussed with the agency or consultant as to the extent of this involvement.
Paying for an agency or consultant to manage your SEM is still not yet standardized across the industry. Some work on a fixed monthly cost, others on an hourly or retainer basis. The most popular method though is working off a percentage of ad spend. The percentage varies from 8% to 25% depending upon the agency or consultant and the task involved. If your goal is to simply drive the cheapest traffic possible then it obviously requires substantially less time than if you had a product that has a finite quantity and constantly needs to be adjusted. Adding in performance based incentives, setup fees, or working for a mandatory minimum amount of ad spend is another way that some agencies and consultants operate.
Contract length is another topic that deserves some attention. A highly skilled agency or consultant has substantial front loaded time dedicated to properly setting up a segmented account, implementing web analytics, conversion tracking, keyword research, etc. To be fair I would recommend a six month contract. The first 90 days are filled with experimentation. As a client do you want to try bidding on competitor keywords (as long as they are not trademarked)? Do your organic keywords convert better or worse as paid keywords? These are all questions that time needs to resolve. Days 91 - 180 are when you truly get a firm understanding of what your ‘money’ keywords are, and has started to optimize your account.
Certification is something that I have been asked about quite frequently. Do you need to hire someone who is an Google Adwords Certified Professional or a Platinum Yahoo Search Marketing Ambassador? The answer in my opinion is that these certificates are similar to what the IT industry has with certificates. Nice to put in a PowerPoint presentation, but not incredibly indicative of ability or skill. I have these certificates and would say that anyone who reads the Adwords Documentation for eight hours could pass this test. Do you really want to ensure your campaign to someone with eight hours of on paper experience? I once had someone who worked for me fail the test the first try, but who I considered my best SEM analyst.
Now that you have some of the basics use the following checklist if you’re looking for an agency to simply handle SEM. Future posts will outline a more comprehensive strategy which I highly recommend. The basic checklist should look like:
- Setup a meeting with several vendors
- Come prepared to explain your product, target cost per acquisition, etc.
- Request an RFP complete with costs, services, and forecasting
- Negotiate terms, reporting, consultation, etc.
- Account should be able to start within one to two weeks of contract signing off
- After 30 days meetings should be setup to assess progress
- Continue to actively monitor your progress on a weekly basis
I’ve tried to cover most of the basics, but for the sake of sanity I haven’t went so deep as to be highly confusing for a novice who is just starting out. For further explanation please feel free to comment or contact us.
Clever Search Engine Marketing Effort by Woot
A few days ago I was looking up the share price of Google and noticed a great ad that Woot had placed, which I captured in a screenshot above. With all of the market turmoil, recession talk, and financial collapse they capitalized with a clever ad reminding people that Woot is available to spend your last remaining dollars. Now I’m not sure what the CPL/CPA is from this strategy, but in my opinion it is one of those intangible brand awareness campaigns that cannot always be accurately measured. Anyone know who handles SEM for Woot or if they are in house?
How To Use Google Analytics on Myspace
I received an interesting email from a reader last week about using Google Analytics on a Myspace profile. As most of you know Myspace does not allow for the addition of JavaScript into profiles, and up until now there has not been a solution to allow for this. Over the years I’ve received thousands of visitors looking for information about this, but I’ve never had a solid solution in which to offer up until now. Please note that this solution is for technically savvy users of Flash, but hopefully an easier solution can be built through a script or simply application. The reader proposed the following solution:
Simply put since Myspace allows embedding flash objects. You can create a flash file 1px by 1px with the same color background as your myspace page. Then you would call the javascript from the flash object as shown at (http://blog.projectx4.com/2008/03/28/google-analytics-flash-easy-peasy/).// GOOGLE ANALYTICS SIMPLE TRACKING /// Script by: corban baxter import flash.external.ExternalInterface; function gaTracking(page) { ExternalInterface.call(“pageTracker._trackPageview”, page); } //end// CODE FOR SIMPLE CALL IS BELOW \\
gaTracking(“/flash/home”); //sends event to google’s analytics system
Please note that I have not verified that this is in fact a permanent solution, but a very clever idea to solve the issue of getting web analytics tracking beyond Myspace’s rudimentary ‘views’ tab. Please feel free to provide comments, and I’ll be sure to update this post as reader’s give it a shot. Through community and heopfully with some web developers with a few spare moments users of Myspace will be able to tag their profiles with Google Analytics.
Top 10 Plugins For Wordpress Blogs
One of the great benefits of running Wordpress is the ability to add in plugins. For those of you unfamiliar to the concept of plugins, they are essentially applications that run in conjunction with Wordpress to perform some kind of function. I currently utilize a wide variety of plugins, but some of my favorite plugins are:
- Akismet - Great built in plugin that controls all of your comment spam.
- All in One Adsense and YPN - Plugin that automatically inserts Adsense and YPN ads into your posts.
- All in One SEO Pack - Automatically creates meta description, meta keywords, etc.
- Contact Form II - Easily allows you to create contact forms to add to your pages and posts.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - Automatically redirects Wordpress feeds to Feedburner feeds for tracking.
- Google Analyticator - Adds your Google Analytics account to all posts. Also tracks outgoing links, etc.
- Google XML Sitemaps - Creates an XML sitemap that alerts Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.
- Wordpress Automatic Upgrade - Update your Wordpress to the newest version automatically.
- Wordpress Database Backup - Emails you a backup of your Wordpress database whenever you prefer.
- WP Super Cache - Fast caching module for Wordpress. Make your blog Digg proof.
What additional plug in make your top 10 list?
My Google Analytics Wish List
Google Analytics is a very robust web analytics solution that Google provides for free, but there are several features that I would love to add to my wish list for consideration in future updates:
- Ability to remove yourself from accounts. I have several old clients who still have me listed on their Google Analytics and have no way to remove myself. Being able to remove yourself from a Google Analytics account would be a great feature.
- Ability to limit access to reports. Right now Google has two account levels (Administrator and User) which is fine, but I’d love to have the ability to gradually increase the amount of reports that users new to web analytics see. Even as a standard user Google Analytics can be overwhelming, and with subsequent training users could have access to more and more reports.
- Create dashboards that encompass multiple sites. I’d love to have the ability to create a dashboard similar to what Omniture offers that is completely customizable, and offers the ability to create droplets from multiple sites within a single dashboard.
- Show me whats changed. There are third party plug ins that allow you to see what keywords have changed, but it requires Firefox, Greasemonkey, and the plug in to work. Not exactly perfect integration. I would like to see this integrated along with information reporting on increasing and decreases across top content, referring sites, etc.
- Simplify goal tracking. The difference between head, exact, and regular expression is not clearly defined in my opinion. Offer the ability to paste additional JavaScript onto your goal page similar to Adwords conversion tracking as an option to tracking conversions. Same thing could be applied to the funnel visualization as many CMS (content management system) solutions offer the ability to customize the page, but not the URL in question.
- Standardize on exact keyword tracking. Currently if you use broad or phrase match in your search engine marketing campaigns the exact keyword is not passed into your web analytics. ROI Revolution has created a great script that places this under user-defined in the visitors section of Google Analytics, but this is not a standard feature.
- Offer offline tracking integration. This one might be a stretch, but I’d love to be able to create a vanity URL through Google for my offline campaigns and then have it redirected and show up in referring sites. I do this normally through purchasing URLs and then 301 redirecting them myself, but for the majority of users this is probably a more advanced feature. Additionally using Voicestar or other solution for phone number tracking would be great.
- Segment out paid vs. organic for other search engines. Right now you have to manually tag all of your destination URLs for Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask if you want them to be segmented out. There are ways to help automate this as I’ve previously blogged about, but still not a true automation. I’d love to see a way of specifying a key that could them automatically sort the campaigns as appropriate.
- Improved site overlay. A plug in like what Omniture uses seems to work consistently better than what Google Analytics uses, especially for sites that use JavaScript, AJAX, and use of other non standard technologies.
- Creation of custom variables for future expansion. Just as how ROI Revolution came out with the exact keyword tracking I would love to have future expansion of custom variables that can be utilized.
What other features would you love for Google Analytics to include in future releases?
Utilizing Adwords To Take Advantage of Metrolink Situation
On Friday a Metrolink train crashed in Los Angeles killing 25 people. This was the deadliest train crash in over 25 years. Almost immediately after this occurred lawyers started buying up keywords such as ‘metrolink crash’ advertising their services. While the practice is fairly common to take advantage of breaking news to buy traffic this seems a little shady. The lawyers who we saw engaging in this include:
- Larry H Parker
- Seeg Miller Johnson
- Get a Referral
- Eisenburg
I completely understand that everyone needs to make a living, but I can’t believe that this is great for your brand as a lawyer to be seen as an ambulence chaser, and possibly the companies or agencies running SEM for these lawyers are simply looking for leads. Has anyone else seen this kind of activity taking place?
Top 5 Tips To Increase Email Marketing Open Rates
Email Marketing is still a widely used online marketing tactic, and can successfully be blasted out to your mailing lists to promote services, announce coupons, communicate your brand, launch new products and services, etc. As email open rates continue to decline here are some tips to increase your open rate. In the near future we’ll look at increasing CTR once you’ve had them actually open the email.
Headline
- Create a sense of urgency
- Play on curiosity
- Add in controversial headline
- Should be 35 characters or less
- Personalize the subject line
From Address
- Try changing the from name
- Try changing the from email address
Testing
- Create email accounts at all major email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.)
- Test to see if any of our email is going into spam
- If so we’ll need to get on a clean domain to send them out
- Test with and without images as some email software is blocking based upon images
Day of the Week Average Open Rate
- Sunday 41.1%
- Saturday 36.7%
- Wednesday 34.0%
- Friday 32.8%
- Tuesday 29.6%
- Thursday 24.6%
- Monday 23.2%
Time of Day and Format
- 8:00AM EST had the highest open rate
- 66% send as plain text (0.46% undeliverable rate)
- 24% send mime format/HTML (0.56% undeliverable rate)
- 10% send HTML only (1.09% undeliverable rate)
Whats With The Intense Apple Fascination?
Today at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event Steve Jobs made a couple announcements:
- He isn’t dead
- Apple iTunes 8 is coming out with minimal new features
- iPhone/iPod Touch 2.1 software update will be available Friday
- New iPod Nanos are soon available with three new colors
As a 3G iPhone user I’m looking forward to 2.1 just with the hope that it will fix my iPhone so that I can finally use apps that I’ve downloaded and paid for. Beyond that, and for my own selfish need of wanting my iPhone to work the announcements made today were minimal at best. You wouldn’t get that impression though if you looked at Techmeme, Digg, and other sites. I took a few screenshots of sites to see the press that Apple is getting. Here is techmeme.com:
Sorry, it wouldn’t fit on one page. Even on my 1650×1080 20″ Mac monitor Apple dominated all stories above the fold, and even stretched below it. In the end Apple stories related to todays ‘announcement’ accounted for approximately 60% or more of techmeme’s entire homepage. The second image shows everything below the fold:
When I went over to Digg the homepage had at least three Apple stories. While Kevin Rose had accurately predicted most of today’s proceedings, and while not all of the stories were positive towards Apple they once again dominated the homepage of Digg.
Now I’m not anti-Apple, but has anyone seen a company dominate the news as much as Apple does? Whatever they announce is immediately picked up by CNN, MSNBC, etc. I get it, they dominate the MP3 market, and have cool ads, along with a phone that everyone wants. Does that mean Apple deserves all of this essentially free press? Ohh well, I guess it lets them concentrate on paying for those nifty takeover ads on cnn.com and others:
What does everyone else think? Please feel free to share your comments.
How To Tag Yahoo Search Marketing Campaigns for Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a robust free web analytics application and provides integration with Google Adwords that allows for automatic importing of your Adwords account performance into Google Analytics. That’s great, but what about for Yahoo Search Marketing? Google and Yahoo account for roughly 90% of search engine market share, and most people in SEM run Search Marketing in conjunction with Adwords. In the past it was possible to manually tag all of your destination URLs by keyword, but it was a time consuming task. What you can do though is to add the following query string at the end of your destination URL:
?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=cpc%20&utm_term={OVKEY}&utm_content={OVADID}&utm_campaign={OVCAMPGID}
This will automatically insert the keyword, ad group, and campaign into Google Analytics along with the source of yahoo and medium of cpc. This should match up what you have with Google Adwords with the exception of cost and keyword position data that is not directly brought in. Copying and pasting this onto your destination URLs can easily be done through excel and then uploaded directly to your Yahoo Search Marketing account. If you need help just ask your Yahoo rep who can initiate a bulk upload of your excel export. I’ll be writing up a similar post for Microsoft adCenter shortly.
