Author Archive
Friday, October 28th, 2011
 Do me a favor… grab your phone and open your business’ website. Don’t have a web capable phone? Go find one, they’re everywhere. Then make other people in the office do it as well. What do you see? The results may surprise you. You could get anything from a blank screen to your whole site just smaller, and it can vary greatly from phone to phone. As more people do their web surfing from their phones this little exercise is going to become more and more important, especially if you’re paying for traffic!
Designing for desktop and mobile are two very different things. Simply displaying your desktop site on a mobile phone is often a huge mistake. The interface and design standards and the goals of the visitor are very different. This is why we are seeing an entirely new generation of Mobile Content Management Systems specifically built for mobile design. Within these systems you can rapidly create a mobile website and bring it online with all the functions that most people expect on their phone.
We have one client in a local service business with 12 offices in the mid-west that created mobile sites in just a few days using GetGoMobi.com. Some designers think that forcing mobile devices to mobile sites is a good idea, we think not. The desktop version of the site often has functionality not in the mobile site that the person may want to access. Conceptually we like to think of the mobile site as not a replacement for the desktop site but a supplement designed specifically for the needs of the mobile user.
The thing you have to realize when it comes to smart phones is that they’re taking over many people’s casual web usage. Need to look up an address, settle a bet, decide what’s for dinner, Google someone you just met, kill time while waiting for something? The smart phone is going to be a “go to” tool for that. I have some friends that aren’t super heavy internet users who have dropped conventional internet services at home completely because their iPhone or Android device fills that gap. I realize that may seem a bit extreme, but these people are out there and if you’re not looking forward for a way to make your web content more compatible with smartphones then you’re going to be in trouble as this trend gets more pervasive.
In the AdWords World we can clearly see this shift and its happening fast. So far this year we have seen dozens of accounts where the mobile traffic has grown by more than 100% in just the first 9 months of this year. In some industries we are seeing more than 10% of traffic is now mobile. In the good news category AdWords gives you control over how your mobile traffic is handled. You can configure the mobile traffic to go to a page designed for the mobile device or if your site is a mobile-wreck you can turn that traffic off and quit paying to embarrass yourself. The key here is you have to think about this because the default in the system is to engage the mobile traffic. You have to turn it off if you are not yet ready to handle it properly.
For a quick example here’s the website for Marc Ecko, a popular clothing designer, as viewed on my PC:
It’s a pretty fantastic an engaging all flash display of creative genius. Here’s Marc’s website when displayed on my iPhone:
See the problem? Although the desktop experience is excellent, the mobile visitor misses out completely. If your site has a similar problem I encourage you to go open your Adwords account and turn off mobile devices in your Adwords campaign settings. No use in paying for visitors that can’t use your site.
Now the “what to do” becomes a little trickier. You need to think about how people interact with your site and what they want. Are they after basic information like your phone number or address? Are they shopping? Making reservations? Reading? Researching? Some of these may sound odd to you but they’re not that uncommon. I’ve done searches for hippopotamus facts in a bar to solve an argument and paid my bills while waiting for flights to take off.
If you’re a localized business that provides a service or is somewhere that one would have to physically go to spend money your two big mobile needs are your address and your phone number. These are the two things people are most likely to be looking for from their phone and you need to make that information easily and immediately accessible. You could either design your page to be easily read even on a small screen, or you could create a mobile only site that visitors are redirected to when they visit with a smartphone. People like GetGoMobi can help you set these types of things up for not a whole lot of money. (Full disclosure, GetGoMobi is a client of ours).
The bottom line here is that mobile is happening and it’s happening fast. So get your team together and design a plan to deal with it.
Tags: mobile sites
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in Mobile Marketing | No Comments »
Friday, October 15th, 2010
 Smart Phones are changing how marketing will be done in the future and in case you’re curious the future is today. If you have not been paying attention to trends in marketing for the last decade the process has shifted from product presentation to a strategy of engage and educate. This change in basic strategy results in a shift in where your marketing dollars are invested in engaging content rather than slick ads. Mobile marketing takes this evolution to the next level.
Everyone I know is trying to figure out how mobile marketing will impact their business and I believe that it will force a higher percentage of your marketing investment to be put into the material creation rather than the delivery vehicle. We will pay less for the ad delivery but much more for the creation of the content we deliver. In mobile marketing all of the old world product pitches are simply considered spam and mobile marketing will be driven by the opt-in list and very few will subscribe to your list if all you do is pitch your product. You have to give them meaningful value that is of interest to them or you will find that they have a very short attention span and a low tolerance for your message.
It’s the list stupid!
Mobile marketing is all about the list. How you gain new subscribers and how you develop your relationships with them are the critical success factors. For most small businesses the infrastructure of mobile marketing will be an SMS service provider. These businesses make it possible for small businesses to use this marketing channel without the huge overhead involved in short codes. Short codes and keywords are the gateway to the SMS process and setting this up is not cheap or easy. Just to get started a short code costs $1,500 per quarter and if you want a special vanity code the cost increases to $3,000 per quarter and this is a long way from delivering your first message. The SMS service providers leverage this by providing a shared short code from which they sell specific keywords. This is how texting a specific word to a short code gets you on the SMS list you want. The big advantage here is that without getting into all the technical challenges and costs a low cost relationship with a SMS service provider you can get your mobile marketing up and running in just hours.
The challenge to all of this is to get people on your list and then treat them so they value the relationship enough that you keep the permission to communicate that they granted you. You do this by clearly articulating the value they will receive and then deliver that value to them. Beyond this you have to get that message out into the market. And of course you have to perform this magic with 140 charters or less.
Talk to those who care about your message
Opt-in marketing has at its core the concept of talking to people that care about your message and quit trying to interrupt people who frankly do not care. People are understandably concerned with the messages that they receive because text messages are an interruption so what you say has to have value or your list will shrink and quickly die. Value is not just a routine discount for the day or a rehash of your print coupon. It needs to be something special that the person is likely to be interested in. Different audiences are going to value messages in different ways but the bottom line is they, not you, need to value the message.
Use QR Codes to Make Subscriptions Easier
 The typical subscription process is a small word sent to a short code but even that can be a barrier for people and to the rescue in this is the QR Code. These are the square codes that you are starting to see in the market that look like this. The person simply uses their phone to scan this code and it sends the word and short code. When done like this the length of the keyword and the short code are no longer an important part of the process because it is all contained within the code and the person never has to interact with it.
There are several competing technologies to provide this functionality to the user but so far the QR Code appears to be the leader. Within these codes there are all sorts of interesting things you can do such as embed the identification of the source of the subscription by using different keywords. QR Codes can be used to connect to a web site, send a text message, dial a phone number, or just enter text.
Caution: Not everything works in all combinations
Mobile is rapidly evolving and like any newer technology there are consistency problems. Not everything works in all the combinations of apps, phones, and services. In our testing the code above worked on some combinations but not others. The iPhone failed to handle this properly with 3 of 4 apps we tested, but it finally did work with one. The DroidX worked the first time and we have no clue if we just got lucky picking the right reader or if the phone is just more open. What we are sure of is that the URL coding seems to be 100% supported but when you get into the other processes your success rate is at risk. Failing to set up the SMS message is either a program bug or a security feature depending on your perspective. The technology has the ability, but delivery may be inconsistent.
Opt-In or Spam – There is No Middle of the Road
“Consumers must ‘Opt-in’ to a short code program from their mobile device before they can be sent anything. Even an initial message that asks for permission is considered SPAM.” Unlike email the carriers have no problem identifying the senders of spam and taking immediate and decisive action for a rule violation.
In mobile marketing you either get them to opt-in or you are a spammer. There are lots of services that will rent out lists that were built in many different ways including contests and other offers. The key is they did not opt-in to hear from you so you better make sure that the value promised matches your message value or you will get a very negative response. If the list was built by offering discount meal coupons and you are going to offer a discount meal coupon then the list is golden. If however the list was built by a win a free trip offer and your offer is a discount for an oil change you need to run not walk away from that list. People do not just dislike being off message, they HATE it, and they can transfer that hate to the business that interrupted them with a message they did not want. Getting people to opt-in to your list is hard work and keeping them is even harder but it is the only way you can play this game.
Deliver Value or Die
I have already said this several times but it is worth repeating. If you want a relationship that allows you to communicate with your market you need to treat them with respect and talk about what they are interested in.
How this relates to Adwords
Building subscriptions is a common goal for Adwords and a subscription offer is a great way to get the relationship started with a low impact transaction. Lowering the commitment level of your conversions almost always increases the percentage of response and is an excellent way to find people interested in what you have to say.
Tags: Mobile Marketing, SMS, Text Messaging
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in Mobile Marketing | No Comments »
Monday, May 10th, 2010
 This is obviously an ad for premium denim. Photo Source: www.diesel.com Have you ever watched a commercial on TV or seen an ad in a magazine only to wonder what it was actually for? Well in some advertising mediums that’s, sort of, okay. For example, if you’re Gucci, a glossy magazine ad featuring a boat full of Italian dudes in speedos is obviously an ad for very expensive shoes. A commercial involving a supermodel brushing her teeth riding a camel walking on the moon, probably denim related. Why not right? In Adwords this approach isn’t going to get you so far. When advertising in Search, if you can’t get to the point in a hurry you’re toast!
You have to remember that Search Marketing is a completely different beast from traditional marketing channels. There’s no need to be endearing or interesting with your search ads because the person viewing it is actually looking for what you do! I know it’s a weird feeling as a marketer to only be talking to people that are specifically looking for your products or services, but embrace that advantage and give the people what they want! With your 25 character Adwords headline you can attempt to be cute or clever, but I wouldn’t recommend it. If any part of your ad is actually read, scanned or glossed over by a searcher it’s going to be your headline so don’t mess it up! Get to the point and do it fast!
A lot of traditional marketers hate to hear this, but generally speaking in Adwords the more boring and straightforward your ad is the better it’s going to do. If you sell swim fins and someone searches for “swim fins,” your ad better be about swim fins! If you decide to be creative and talk about the beach or duck feet or something else not quite on point be advised your CTR will suffer! There’s a big difference between noticing your ad and clicking on it, don’t leave yourself on the wrong side of this equation.
Another major headline offender is leading off with your company name… in most situations this is NOT the right answer. While you may be a big deal to other people in your industry, there’s a good chance a prospect has never heard of you. Serving them an ad that’s focused on your company and not what they searched for is a lose lose situation. The searcher doesn’t get what they searched for, and you don’t get a visitor to your web site. As an added bonus, the searcher still doesn’t even know what you do because you decided to lead with your name as opposed to your value to them.
The “secret” of getting your ads to work in Adwords is to get to the point. Use the keyword as a clue to their interests and address that interest. When the keywords are tightly clustered and the headline is on-target the results can be amazing, even if the headline is boring. A surprisingly simple concept but most great ideas in marketing are simple after they have been discovered.
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in ad copy, adwords | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
 Google likes to come up with new and helpful tools to make it easier to manage an Adwords account to reach their goals. Wait what? Yup, most of the suave little tools they come up with are tilted in their favor not yours! Like I’ve said before Google is just like Vegas, the house always wins. The more information they give you, the more paranoid you feel about how much you are bidding. The First Page Bid info that was launched a while back basically gives you what they want you to bid to get on the first page of search results. Can you get on the first page for less? Oftentimes yes. Will most people just blindly believe the First Page Bid and apply it directly to their account without testing it? Oftentimes yes. Apparently this was such a hit with the accounting department they decided to up the ante and introduce the Bid Simulator. Now they’re leveraging impressions against your bid in an effort to extract more money from your wallet. Tread lightly with this one kids!
So here’s an example of the Bid Simulator for you to check out. This is out of a fairly competitive national campaign. The estimator is not bad when you compare it to real life, we did get 87 clicks at the current bid with a solid position 1.1 and a 4.52% CTR. However the tool is recommending increasing the bid to $7.97 from $3.01 which is a whopping 165% increase. For the extra money we get an additional 450 impressions and 17 clicks with a 3.7% CTR (notice they don’t do that math for you) which is much lower than the current performance. Since CTR is a large part of quality score, the likely effect of this will be to drive your quality score down resulting in a need for a higher bid to hold your current position. By the way, look at how easy it is to just pick a button to make the change… compare that with the click maze required to turn off the Content Network. < sarcasm >Weird that one would be so much easier than the other. < /sarcasm >
So here’s my big question: where are all these extra impressions coming from? I mean I’m not losing them to position, improving on position 1 is somewhat problematic, so what’s up? Break out your tinfoil helmets; I have 2 (conspiracy) theories about it.
1. Google is holding impressions hostage
So my first theory is that even though your current bid is totally adequate, Google thinks it’s not enough. They let you rank highly when you serve, but they hold back on how many impressions you get. If you’re going to get the rest of the impressions you’re going to have to bid what they want you to bid. The price of the impression ransom is right there in the Bid Simulator waiting for you to save the day.
2. The extra impressions are born of extended broad match mixed with irresponsible bidding
My other theory is that there will always be more impressions if more money is involved. The keyword matching will get looser and looser to accommodate your obvious disregard for money. I would venture to say that a big percentage of those “missed” impressions are garbage that you didn’t want in the first place.
Although the Bid Simulator is interesting, I think it’s more of an attempt to make you bid higher than it is to help your account. Think about it, Google offers you new impressions of questionable value from a mystery source. You feel compelled to get in on the action and pick one of the pretty radio buttoned options presented to you. 2 or 3 of your competitors do the same thing and now the competition for your niche ad space has just jumped up by multiple dollars. Who wins in this transaction? Not you, Google. I highly recommend that you do your own testing to find real impression levels and watch your search query reports closely to ensure you’re not getting loads of off topic clicks. An attentive mind will beat fancy tools and automation every time.
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in adwords, bid_simulator, bidding strategy | 1 Comment »
Friday, June 26th, 2009
 In honor of Take Your Dog to Work Day I present you Loki the Adwords Dog. Here in the office pretty much everyday is take your dog to work day. Despite his lack of opposable thumbs, Loki is an Adwords keyword generation expert with a focus on the Roofing industry 
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in adwords_monster, loki | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
Sometimes the best course of action in Search Marketing is to just let it ride. It sounds lazy, but sometimes it’s the smartest thing you could do. I realize this might not always be a popular option, but there are cases in which doing nothing is the best thing you can do for your site.
We manage Adwords for a client that had an incredibly successful organic position for their number one keyword while at the same time doing everything wrong from an SEO perspective. This is a very old site that earned its authority and trust ranking a long time ago. We do not work on the SEO, but we do manage the analytics and report on overall traffic so it was hard to miss this one. In spite of big mistakes like the home page being titled “Home,” it ranked first for the business’s major keywords. The site has tons of links and authority that helped push it into this position despite it lacking the basics of SEO. Google thought so much of this site that it actually changed the title of the page to be more relevant and even re-titled the site links on the expanded listing.
When we first started working with this client our guidance was to leave these core pages alone! When you already rank 1st for a major keyword with an expanded listing, there’s nowhere else to go so just let it ride… especially if you really shouldn’t be ranking as high as you are. If it ever breaks that’s when you’ll need to go in and fix it, but in the meantime it works beautifully even though it shouldn’t.
Recently someone decided to ignore this advice and re-titled the pages, and… well you can see the aftermath…
 This site’s strongest keyword dropped from ranking 1st to ranking between 3rd and 6th, and it switched from the Google generated headline to the newly written title. This new title didn’t even have the main keyword in it! Not good! This caused a roughly 66% drop in visits. Chances are if they would have left it alone we’d still be seeing that same stream of visitors that have been coming in via that word for years.
Is there a chance the site will fight its way to the top? Yes. But will it have been worth it to lose thousands of visitors just in order to get back to the same spot it already had? Probably not. Remember whenever you’re assessing a situation “do nothing” can be a valid answer in certain circumstances!
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in SEO | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
 Yesterday Bob and myself were invited up to the Googleplex for a workshop/feedback session. We had a great time learning about new tools and giving direct feedback to the engineers working on them. There was a small group of regular advertisers and a few agency types in the meeting and I think we were actually outnumbered by Googlers! I really like how interested the Google team is in feedback from real users, and their willingness to accept ideas and consider making those changes to upcoming products. Some of the stuff we learned yesterday is definitely going to be making its way into client accounts shortly.
Oh and everything you hear about the fantastical food situation at the Mountain View campus… totally true, We left well fed and happy
We’d like to give a big thank you to our National Agency Team for inviting us, and to Google for putting together such an informative and productive day!
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in googleplex | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
 Here in the office we tend to fall in and out of love with the Content Network. Over the last couple of years it has gotten progressively better for the advertiser. It used to be downright awful for most people, but the advent of things like the placement report has given us much more control over where on the internet your ad is served. The Content Network can be a powerful generator of traffic and leads, but it is still capable of amazing amounts of waste if you do it wrong. Like everything in Adwords, there is an ignorance tax to be paid if you don’t know the right way to deal with the system. Here are some tips on how to use the Content Network without getting used.
First things first – Do NOT mix content and search in the same campaign!!! They don’t work the same way and they need to be managed separately. Plus the value of Content and Search traffic is not equal and should be budgeted separately as well. While we are talking about budgets and money, start your bids much lower in content than you would in search. In most accounts an appropriate content bid is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of what you would pay in search. Obviously there are exceptions, but this rings true for the majority of accounts. Oftentimes when we take over existing accounts we discover that Content has been eating up a disproportionate amount of the daily budget and no one had any idea. If you’re going to do content, set up a new campaign for only content traffic and turn off search in that campaign.
Just because you can’t track which keyword is generating a view doesn’t mean you should just toss all your Content keywords into a bucket. Group your keywords into themes. Google takes a more holistic approach to serving Content ads. They’re looking at how relevant your ad group is to the content they’re trying to match. Content ad groups don’t need to be quite as laser focused as Search, but you should take similar care when creating them.
While doing keyword research for Content, be bolder in your keyword selections. Things you could never get away with in search could be good for content. For example if you sell Nike running shoes you would never want to bid on the word running by itself. There would be way too many off topic searches, your CTR would be awful, and it would negatively impact your Quality Score. In the Content Network you want this word because it’s relative to what your target audience is reading about. A site dedicated to running or an article about a marathon is ideal real estate for your ad, a search query for running is not.
Run placement reports on a regular basis, this is a big deal! This is the only way to really know where your money is going, and individual sites have a tendency to surreptitiously run away with a big pile of your money. This is a good place to catch fraud or just sites that you don’t want your ad served on. Typically Google will catch most major fraudulent action, but we’ve managed to retrieve large sums of money for clients based on what we’ve found in placement reports.
A couple of years ago we’d advise most people to skip the Content Network, it wasn’t a very nice neighborhood. There was value in there but, it was difficult to get to. These days we are much more likely to utilize Content because it is much more controllable. The tracking and targeting has improved dramatically. It’s still a dangerous place however. Be smart and careful with where and how you spend your money and you’ll find the Content Network to be worth the effort.
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in adwords, content-network | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
In Adwords keywords are, well… key. There’s no denying that. Personally however, I believe that structure is ultimately more important than the keywords. Picking keywords isn’t really where the magic happens. Most business owners can come up with a semi-decent keyword list on their own, but the disconnect is in the implementation. Deciding how to structure these keywords into groups is where you go from a dude with a bucket full of keywords to a man with a plan.
We take over a lot of existing Adwords accounts and one of the most common mistakes we see is the Bucket campaign. A bucket is where you have done all your keyword research and then dumped all the keywords into one ad group. This isn’t a good way to run an account. In Adwords the goal is to match the topic of your ad as closely to the user query as possible. To succeed at Adwords you need to divide your ad groups down to the smallest unit possible and then target your ad text to that subject and land your visitors on the most relevant page possible. To take the time to do it right is good for your click through rates, your quality score, the user’s experience, and most importantly your conversion rate.
What I do first when setting up an account is pull together every possible keyword. I parse through the site, the individual products, competitor’s sites, enthusiast sites, and industry sites looking for keyword inspiration and collect it all in an Excel file. Once that monster list of keywords is in place, start looking for themes and trends in it. When I start to find trends or clusters of similar words I drag them into their own columns (having a dual monitor set up can be really useful for this!). To help illustrate, let’s pretend we’re working on a surf shop’s web site. You would break their keyword list into: surfboards, wetsuits, board shorts, footwear, t-shirts, hats, etc.
Once you have your first sort completed start looking at your columns of keywords, how can this be separated even more? Let’s start by looking at wetsuits. Your wetsuits can be broken down into general keywords (wetsuit), branded keywords (Body Glove, O’Neil, Blueseventy, Billabong, Aquasphere, etc.), and style of wetsuit (full suits, hooded suits, spring suits, triathlon suits). If appropriate you may even want to take some of these groups and break them into even smaller pieces by product within your brands (Blueseventy Helix, Blueseventy Point Zero, Blueseventy Reaction), or whatever logical grouping you may have available. An ad with a headline like “BlueSeventy Helix Wetsuit” is going to capture a lot more quality traffic than one that reads “Surf Shop Deals Here.”
I realize what I’ve laid out here is a lot of work, but right and easy aren’t typically the same thing. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and make the process from search to purchase as easy as possible. Doing things right the first time will save you a lot of time and money down the road.
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in PPC, adwords, granularization | No Comments »
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
The idea behind geo targeting your Adwords is that you can serve your ads exclusively to people within a certain geographic range. For example you can choose to serve just the United States, Only California, or just a few cities around your office. Everybody understands how this is supposed to work but marketing is never that simple. Geo targeting is a lot more complicated than that and Google doesn’t always choose to adhere to your preset geo targets.
The first tricky part about geo targeting is determining where a search came from. Judging geographic location based on IP addresses isn’t particularly an exact science. For example, my house is in Arroyo Grande but according to Google Analytics visits from these locations have registered as Pismo Beach, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Margarita. Those are 5, 17, and 26 miles away from my computer respectively. When you’re geo-targeting you have to realize that you need to target where your customers attach to the internet, not necessarily where they physically are. We find if you draw your own custom target ranges that it’s a best practice to draw your area a little wide especially if you’re dealing with small towns. Also you’re pretty much dreaming if you think you can effectively split a city. You can draw a geo target that only covers the north side of town, but who knows how many people on the north side actually attach to the internet via servers on the north side. This gets even more exciting with proxy servers, mobile services, masked IP addresses, privacy software, and lots of other technical challenges.
The other thing that makes geo targeting a little more exciting is the Google factor. Google has a tendency to be “helpful,” especially if they can pick up a buck in the process (…think Automatic Matching and Budget Optimizers). When you geo target a campaign they take this as a firm suggestion not an absolute directive. All of your geo targeting efforts can be overridden by the right query. As far as Google is concerned relevance trumps geographic campaign settings. Because of this I can get an ad for a Milwaukee Lawyer here in California despite his geo targeting effort to cover just his corner of Wisconsin. This could be a good or a bad thing and that’s why you need to know that this can happen.
The upside is a that searcher making a super specific search like “Huntsville Alabama exterminator” is probably very interested in ads targeted to Huntsville even if the searcher is on the other side of the country. By Google deciding to serve this ad you are getting in front of a searcher that you could have never planned for or anticipated. There are a million reasons why someone from out of town would look for a product or service in another location… preparing to move, their kids go to college there, planning a vacation, they’re on vacation and planning to buy something when they get home, researching for a friend, etc. These are people who don’t fit your geo target but are specifically searching for your business.
Ultimately this is a Public Service Announcement type of post because Google will serve what they feel is relevant and you can’t stop them. On top of geo targeting you do have one last line of defense, exclusions. Within a targeted area you can choose to exclude certain cities, states, or regions. For example say that you have a tourism site for Austin, TX that is focused on bringing visitors to the city, but you don’t want to spend money on local visitors. You could target the entire state of Texas and exclude Austin. It’s not a perfect fix but it is one more layer of defense against Google deciding what they think you would want. In our testing of this, Google seems to respect exclusionary boundaries much more than inclusionary boundaries.
The bottom line is that Google puts forth a good effort to follow your geographic preferences. The system is somewhat imperfect, but so is almost everything in marketing.
Posted by Rob Dumouchel in adwords, geo-targeting | No Comments »
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