The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog: October 2007

Targeted Online Advertising with Facebook

Facebook has just released a new advertising platform called Flyers Pro ads intended specifically for serving targeted ads to Facebook users. Rather than serving ads based on keywords, like search ads, the ads are served based on user profiles. For example, you can choose to display ads to users who, according to their profile, are fans of a certain TV show, movie, or sports team. You can also target them based on where they stand politically - liberal, moderate, or conservative (what about Libertarians like me?).

I confess to knowing little about Facebook. I used to play in a band, and we used MySpace to promote our band. But in the last couple of years I've just been too busy to spend much time engaging in online social networking. So the whole Facebook phenomenon has pretty well passed me by. Another part of it is that I am already on the outside of the age range of heavy users of the service.

According to Facebook, the oldest age with at least 1 million Facebook uers is 24, and the age with the most total Facebook uers is 19. I'm 34, so I'm on the outside looking in.

BUT...I am an Internet marketer. So now that Facebook is opening itself up as a marketing medium, I'm interested. The way ads in Facebook are targeted is completely different from search engines. Will it be effective? Who knows? But it's definitely something that advertisers should try out. I know we will. Like all forms of marketing, it will take a lot of testing to find what works (if it works at all), but it is a low cost form of marketing that should be explored.

If you could use some help with your online marketing, please contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: advertising, Facebook, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, October 29, 2007

Picking Up Search Engine Traffic with Misspelled Keywords

My brother/partner and I had a good laugh the other day. We're based in Nashville, and let's face it - people around here have their own unique take on the English language. We are working on a new design for the Work Media web site, and Chris accidentally typed "Inernet marketing" at the top of our new home page - which is pretty well the way the word "internet" is pronounced by many people around here.

But that got me thinking - we would probably pick up a lot of traffic if we actually had a page that emphasized "inernet" rather than "internet". That technique has worked for us before accidentally. There have been times when, while looking at our site stats, I would notice we were getting traffic from what at first seemed like a fantastic keyword. Upon further inspection, we were getting the traffic because we had misspelled the word. But you know what? Web surfers misspelling the word the same way found our site because of it.

So purposely creating pages optimized for specific misspelled words is a strategy that can be quite effective. Now, you want to be careful with this strategy. You don't want to use it so much that it creates the impression that you just don't know how to spell. But if there are high traffic terms for which you would like to rank but just can't seem to because of excessive competition, ranking for a misspelled version of the search terms can be a very nice technique for picking up some of that traffic.

The misspelled keyword strategy can be used in your paid search campaigns as well to pick up high ad placement for much cheaper than properly spelled keywords.

If you could use some help developing a keyword strategy for your natural or paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. Cawl us tooday!

Labels: internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine optimization, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Friday, October 26, 2007

Find Ways to Get Content on Your Web Pages

We're still amazed at the number of times we get contacted about optimizing a BRAND NEW web site that is lousy from an optimization standpoint. Usually the problem is that the site is constructed in such a way that it is very difficult to get any optimized content on the site. For example, it may be an all-Flash site or a site where the text is contained in images.

Please remember this: you MUST have text on your web pages!

Find a way to get some text on your web pages. One technique which is cool is to place text in layers (using div tags) and either hide it off-screen or dynamically display it at certain times, such as when rolling over a link or other object. We have heard that Google may now be checking for this, so it may be a technique that stops becoming useful soon.

Regardless of whether you use layers to hide your text or whatever, you MUST get some text on your page. If nothing else, place it low on the page, below the main section, if your site is constructed in such a way as to not allow text in the main content area.

As smart as search engines have become, they are STILL looking for quality, indexable text. So get some text on your pages!

For help optimizing the content and code of your web site to rank better in the search engines, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: content, content creation, internet marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Astounding Results with Social Bookmarking

For one of our clients we are currently promoting, we are doing a lot of linking - pretty standard stuff for a search engine optimization campaign. As part of this process, we are doing a fair amount of social bookmarking of our client's web pages. We started with del.icio.us, probably the top social bookmarking web site.

We bookmarked every page of the site and tagged each page with a static set of keywords plus keywords specific to that page. Within a couple of days, our main social bookmarks page about those topics was near the top of Google's rankings for some of the keywords - actually above the client we're promoting! So while that's not exactly what we're ultimately trying to achieve, it proves the point that search engines place a lot of stock in information that is categorized via social bookmarking. And in the long run it will help our client rise in the rankings. Although, if someone clicks our link, they will be presented with nothing but links to our client's site - a win, win situation.

Another point is that by bookmarking our client's site, we exposed it to lots of other people who use the same social bookmarking site. If some of them bookmark our client's pages as well, then that strengthens our client's position. And del.icio.us is only one of probably dozens of similar sites, all of which can be used to promote a web site about a particular subject.

So is you have not socially bookmarked your own site's web pages, we strongly recommend it. And have all of your employees sign up for their own accounts and do it as well.

If you need some help promoting your site in the social bookmarking sites (or anywhere else), contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: internet marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo, social bookmarking, social media, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, October 22, 2007

Google Site Links Expansion Gives Marketers More Control

If you don't currently have a Google WebMaster account that you use to submit XML sitemap files to Google, get one! The URL is:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview

This allows you to directly tell Google about the structure and indexable content of your site, rather than passively waiting for Google to find it on its own. As a bonus, Google will sometimes display multiple links from a sitemap-submitted web site in the site's listing in a Google search engine results page (SERP).

And now Google is expanding the number of links that it will show in your listing, up to eight. Think about that: your SINGLE Google search listing could have nine different links into your site. We're all about shelfspace expansion (meaning maximizing the number of times your site appears on a SERP via natural and paid search), so this is a very good development.

It is also possible to now indicate to Google in your XML sitemap file what pages, if any, you would NOT like to show up in the site links listings for your site.

Google Sitemaps give you the opportunity to more easily get your site content indexed AND increase the total number of links you have on a page of search engine results. So do it today!

If you need help maximizing your search engine marketing, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, internet marketing, search engine marketing, search marketing, sitemap, web marketing, web site marketing

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dynamic Keyword Insertion in Google AdWords Ads

We are perplexed by how mysterious Google tends to make things. Certainly, the company does everything it can to hide the intricacies of its search algorithms so as to disallow anyone taking advantage of it for artificial gains in search rankings. Fair enough. But Google goes far beyond that in hiding its secrets.

We recently ranted a bit about Google's sparse documentation related to its AdWords API and about the lack of logic behind ad Quality Scores. We're just as perplexed about Google's failure to give full disclosure about all of the features of AdWords. We are Google certified, having studied all of Google's exam material, but we had never read anything about dynamic keyword insertion until we stumbled upon it by accident.

That's right. Just like Yahoo! and MSN, Google allows you to dynamically insert keywords into an ad. The reason for doing this is that the closer the ad matches the intentions of the viewer, the greater the likelihood of generating a click to your site. By inserting the exact keyword that triggered the ad into the title or ad copy, you more closely match that user's intentions.

To dynamically insert a keyword, place the following code where you want the keyword to appear: {keyword: default keyword}. Replace "default keyword" with the keyword that should appear if the trigger keyword is too long in characters for the ad. For example, if the dynamic variable is used in the title, but the keyword triggering the ad is more than 25 characters, then the default keyword will be used.

Don't overuse dynamic keyword insertion or your ads will all become very generic and boring. But it is a powerful tool to use in moderation.

For help managing your paid search campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: ad writing, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, sponsored search, web marketing, web site marketing

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 4

We're big on gaining as much Google "shelf space" as possible. In other words, for any particular keyword we are targeting, we want to have a paid search listing on the search results page as well as at least one natural search ranking. We think it greatly increases your chance of getting a click to your site, and it is a strong branding move. To make this happen, you need to create landing pages specific to certain keywords. This improves your chances of converting the visitor into a customer AND gives you the opportunity to heavily optimize a page for natural search listings.

Keeping all this in mind, we've decided we would like our AdWords management application to also be useful in optimizing landing pages for natural search rankings. The first part of this is providing the natural Google search rankings for each keyword. In other words, I don't want to just know what my ad position is for a keyword - I also want to know what my natural rank for that keyword is. This information will help me generate shelf space.

Unfortunately, as usual, Google makes things much more difficult than it should be. Google used to have a search API that would return search results and related information. But that API is no longer available. There is a new search API, but it is an AJAX JavaScript-based control, which really doesn't help us in our situation because we need that data on the server side, not the client side. We also need ranking data, which doesn't seem to be available in any fashion via any Google API.

But we've figured out a way to do it. It's much more processor intensive than if we could just request the information directly from Google, but that's alright. We're getting it done, even though it's a lot more work than it should be. Why Google is intent on making its vendors and customers jump through hoops is beyond me, but the situation is what it is. We'll deal with it. We can't wait for the day when Microsoft catches up with Google in terms of natural search traffic and keyword inventory, because we know Microsoft would make it easier to plug into their backend to get the data we need.

So we carry on, fighting one battle after another. When we're done, we will have an application that will make it much easier for us to manage our own clients' paid and natural search campaigns. The next step would be to open it up to others who might want to use it for their own campaigns.

If you could use some help managing your own search engine marketing campaign, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine optimization, search marketing, web site marketing

Thursday, October 11, 2007

A Rant About Google Quality Score

We don't do a whole lot of complaining in this blog. We like to stay on the positive side. But Google is really getting on our nerves with its keyword "Quality Score". A representative from Google described Quality Score thusly:

"Quality Score is a dynamic variable assigned to each of your keywords. It's calculated from various factors, including the relevance of your ad and keyword, your keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, and your landing page quality.

Quality Score is used to determine your ads' position on Google and the Google Network. It's also used to determine your keywords' minimum bids. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the better your ad position and the lower your minimum bids."

Okay, no problem. Only...from what we are experiencing first-hand in many instances, Quality Score works very poorly.

We have ad groups running in which a keyword perfectly matches the text used in the ad and on the landing page, and that have a reasonable click-through rate (or no click-through rate because it's brand new)...and Google is still giving us a low quality score!

Basically, Google can assign a low Quality Score to any keyword and mandate that the advertiser pay an outrageous price for clicks, even if there is not a single other advertiser for the keyword. As far as we can tell, the logic for determining Quality Score has some serious problems. Google is forcing advertisers to overpay when it should not be necessary.

Is this good for Google? It might make them a few more bucks in the short-term, but long-term they are going to hurt advertisers and force them to go elsewhere. It's simple economics. If advertisers are forced into paying so much for clicks that it makes it impossible to generate a positive return on investment, then they will stop advertising there. Is Google so big and powerful that it can afford to have its customers start leaving? I don't think so.

Hey Google, how about letting the market determine what advertisers are successful and stop meddling in every little detail of everything that happens? Control freaks...

If you are experiencing your own Google frustration and need some help managing your AdWords account, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, Quality Score, search engine marketing, search marketing, web marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Preparing for the Onslaught of New Business

Jerry Work here. I have no idea what to write about today. I'm not feeling very inspired. I have not had very much time the last few days to work on the AdWords management application, so there's not much to talk about with that. I was up ALL night Monday night working on a proposal that could mean a very large piece of business for us. I got it sent out yesterday about 10:00 in the morning. So I was useless yesterday and got next to nothing done. But that's what is beautiful about running your own company. If you need to work 24 hours straight one day and take the next day off, well, there's nobody to tell you you can't do it (although clients can definitely dictate such things).

Soon Chris and I will be bringing our other brother, Corey, into the business. He is currently working on his Google certification and working hard to get up to speed. Then we'll be out of brothers, so whoever the fourth person is who comes into the company may have to come from outside the family.

Very soon, we are going to be slammed with more work than we can get done. Then we'll really need to start ramping up our personnel. That will be interesting. I've been on the interviewee side of the table many times. And I hate it. But the time is coming when I'll be on the interviewer side, which will definitely be a nice change. But will I be a hardass like some interviewers I have dealt with, or will I be cool and try to make the job applicant comfortable? I don't know. I'll have to find my style, although I will probably lean toward the laid back side.

I'm a huge fan of the eMyth books. One of the primary themes of those books is that a business needs to run like a franchise. Your business needs to run on systems, not people. You should run your business in such a way that anyone could be plugged into it and immediately take care of business. We're not there yet, but we're working on it. We have written several Internet marketing guides and are working on tools to automate much of what we do. It takes a ton of time doing that stuff - time that could be spent on generating business - but I think it's critical that BEFORE we get overrun with work, we are prepared for it and have a plan for managing the workload.

Well, there you go. I've managed to crank out a blog by talking about every day stuff. This actually relates to a blog I posted a long time ago where I said that not every blog you post has to be substantial in length or quality. We always try to teach some kind of lesson in our blog, but sometimes you just gotta mail it in. The main thing is just to get it out. Somehow.

If you need help with your Internet marketing, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: blog, blogging, blogging advice, business planning, internet marketing

Monday, October 08, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 3

Today we will continue with our series of posts chronicling the development of our proprietary Google AdWords management application.

One thing that's a little unwieldy about using the Google AdWords API via its various Web Services is that every time a Web Service is called, you have to pass in a number of variables, such as the account email and password, the client email, and the developer and application tokens. And it's not as simple as setting properties of an object to these values. The values have to be set as arrays, so I have to create a variable to hold each value, then pass that value into a single element array, etc. etc. This can result in a lot of code just that doesn't really DO anything. To get around this, all of the code that actually involves using the Web Services is placed in separate classes that my web user controls call.

Which brings us to another key development strategy, which is breaking major chunks of user interface and functionality into their own web user controls. This way, those same elements can be easily reused on other web pages. It takes more time early in the development process to set things up this way, but it will save us a lot of time down the road.

One thing that seems odd about the way the Google AdWords API works is that it has a service called Criterion Service that is used to do things like add or remove keywords or web sites from a campaign, or add new keywords. To me, it seems like it would make more sense for there to be a function provided by the Ad Group Web Service that would return the keywords for a particular ad group. A lot of the AdWords API functionality seems counter-intuitive.

We have quite a few working components of the system, so this week we will probably begin tying everything together into a cohesive unit. This is going to be exciting.

If there is anything we can do to help you manage your paid search or natural search campaigns, feel free to contact us at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sponsored search, web site marketing

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application - Part 2

I had a good day yesterday working on our Google AdWords management application. I started implementing keyword research functionality. I created a .NET user control and class that lets the user perform keyword research, using Google's keyword data, which is returned in the form of a datatable with checkboxes that allow the user to specify the particular keywords he wants to use. Then we added a couple of functions which we think gives the user a lot more flexibility than when using Google's AdWords interface. After selecting his keywords, the user can either add them to any existing ad group in the campaign or use them to create a new ad group. Essentially, we have broken keyword research/addition out of the ad group creation process and made it a standalone process. We feel that this will greatly speed up the process of creating new ad groups or adding keywords to existing ad groups.

Speed is going to be a critical aspect of our application. The online Google AdWords interface seems like it is tailored toward users who need a step-by-step, "take me by the hand" approach. Google is probably right in designing its interface for the inexperienced user. But for the experienced user, the interface is slow and clumsy, and often not very practical.

Google does provide a much quicker, leaner AdWords management tool, the Google AdWords Editor, which we have blogged about extensively. The AdWords Editor is an offline, client-side application that can be used to create ad groups and other account elements, and move things around quickly. However, since it is completely disconnected from the Internet, it has no research functionality. We feel that our application, which will run on-line, bridges the gap between the off-line tool and the default online AdWords interface. It won't be as quick to use as AdWords Editor, since it will still have to move data back and fourth from Google's servers, but it will be a more complete management environment.

I would be fibbing if I said that we had this application completely laid out and designed before we started coding. We needed to get a feel for what we could with the AdWords API in order to know what we could do. And the best way to do that was just to start coding. So the application is very organic - growing as we program it, right before our eyes.

If you have some particular features you would like to see in such an application, feel free to email your ideas to us at Info@WorkMedia.net. And as we always say, please contact us if you need some help managing your Google AdWords or other paid search campaign. You can email or call us at 888-299-4837.

Labels: AdWords Editor, api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, web site marketing

Wednesday, October 03, 2007

Chronicling the Development of a Google AdWords Management Application

Jerry Work here. I think I never commented on my daughter. She had surgery last week to fix a kidney reflux problem, which basically caused her urine to flow the wrong way. The surgery went well, although there will probably be some additional future treatment required. So that's the update there.

I mentioned in our last blog post that we have begun programming our own Google paid search management application. I thought I would spend the next couple of blog posts discussing that process. This may turn into a whole series of posts chronicling the development process. We'll see.

First off, Google does not make it easy to figure out how to use its Google AdWords API and Web Services. There is an API reference, although one critical page of information didn't seem to be linked to from anywhere (that I could find) and was only discovered by searching the API reference web site. And the code samples are very sparse. It almost seems as if Google wants to make things difficult.

I have also searched online for code samples or tutorials that discuss using the AdWords API and have found next to nothing. So we're having to do things the hard way - by trying things out to see what works. We are building the application on the .NET 2.0 platform. At one time I was a certified .NET C# developer. That was several years ago, but once I got into the development process it all (well, maybe not ALL) started coming back to me.

So the main hat I am wearing in the company right now is that of application developer. Chris is really keeping the company going for the most part, while I spend as much time as I possibly can programming. I am using Microsoft's free Visual Web Developer software to build the application. I have to say, I am impressed by the little program. It is barebones but much simpler to use that full-blown Visual Studio. And since our application is meant to run on-line, it works just fine for our purposes. One thing that I love about it is that I can easily run the application on my development workstation without placing the code on a server. I just click the run button and it launches the site in my browser, running on its own built-in server.

So far, the application is communicating with the Google server, returning data related to ad groups, bids, and so fourth. The very first time I actually made that work, I was thrilled, even though all it was was a text string with the name of an ad group. We've already come a long way since that point, with nicely formatted data grids that contain all kinds of data, including performance data.

In our next blog post, we'll talk more about the challenges of pulling this off and where we're going with it. Until then, if you need some help managing your paid or natural search marketing campaigns, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, google, Google Adwords, internet marketing, paid search, pay per click, ppc, search engine marketing, search marketing, sem, web marketing, web site marketing

Monday, October 01, 2007

Mashups - the Future of Online Application Development

Jerry here. For those of you who had inquired about the status of my daughter, she is doing just fine. The surgery was a success. She is waking up in the middle of the night in quite a bit of pain, but for the most part she is still a happy, healthy baby. I was at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital most of the week, so little real work was done. But now that that is over with, we can get back to the business of Internet marketing!

The future of online application development will involve heavily around "mashups", which are applications that combine functionality from different APIs ("Application Programming Interfaces"). Many companies, such as Google, make data available via Web Services. A Web Service is a way of retrieving data in XML format for use in an application. For example, Google has Web Services which provide search data and that allow you to manage AdWords accounts. By accessing these Web Services (which, in turn, provide access to APIs), you can create your own custom applications that let you manage AdWords accounts and perform various other functions.

In general, when accessing data via a Web Service, you create a "class" that uses the functions provided by the Web Service. Web Services are written in a language called WSDL ("Web Services Description Language"), which can be used to generate a class. The class, in turn, provides methods and properties that can be used in the application code.

So what is the point? It's that if there is an online marketing application you need that doesn't exist, chances are pretty good there are Web Services that can be accessed that will make the development of the application much easier. Sure, you still need to be able to program, but programmers can be hired for cheap (try elance.com) if you can clearly define what the application needs to do and there are Web Services that provide the necessary access to data.

Work Media is working on a proprietary AdWords management system that works by using Google's Web Services. What features would you like to see in your ideal paid search management program? We would love to hear from you on this matter. What other kind of application could you use that would improve your online marketing? Chances are pretty good that there are some Web Services that could make it possible.

If you have an idea for a new online marketing application and need some help, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: api, application development, internet marketing, mashup, paid search, pay per click, ppc, programming, search engine marketing, web marketing, web service

The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

Wednesday, October 31, 2007