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11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:31:29 +0000

As I have found out the hard way, Facebook ad production is extremely labour-intensive. Therefore it is imperative that you incorporate an effective ad production workflow to best utilise your time. Here are eleven tips I’ve been able to come up with over the past few months.

Understanding the account structure

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user’s Facebook account. Campaigns are the second tier that sit under the account level. Unlike in Google Adwords where ads are held within ad groups, campaigns hold ads within Facebook. It’s at the campaign level that daily budgets are assigned. Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creative, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it’s best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads as it would make reporting and managing budgets so much easier.

Step 1 – get your target demographic right

Begin by making a list of demographic segments you want to target or make sure you are clear about who your client wants you to target. It’s always handy to ask your client to describe exactly who their target consumer is. This should be your first step in setting up your Facebook advertising campaign.

E.g. targeting list:

Females, age 18-30, who like Kim Kardashian and live in Orlando.
Males, age 25 and older, engaged or in a relationship, and interested in weddings or honeymooning.

Step 2: create your ads

Facebook has no process to save ads without submitting them for editorial approval. This is one of the greatest weaknesses to the user interface and the ad creation process and is a serious pain the rear. Therefore, it’s most efficient to submit one version of an ad for each social segment for approval at the time of research. It would be a complete waste of time if all your ad variants didn’t pass editorial scrutiny. Once the draft ads are approved, you’ll be able to tweak, duplicate and build ad variations and resubmit.

Step 3: designate the landing page

If the landing page has not already been determined, designate or create a page that is relevant to the draft copy. It’s extremely important to make sure the landing page is relevant for two reasons:

1) Facebook editorial might reject ads that take users to pages that aren’t relevant.

2) You would see a very high bounce rate, which means your time, effort, and money will be wasted.

Therefore, I cannot stress enough the importance of a great landing page. It’s often best to create specific landing pages solely for PPC campaigns. Trust me, the investment in development time will yield higher return on investment and provide a more effective PPC campaign.

Step 4: create your ad copy

The ad title, image, and body need to be reasonably related to pass editorial review. Again, choosing relevant images and writing compelling ad copy are critical to receiving higher click through rates.

Step 5: define your customer

This is the fun part. Use all the targeting attributes to fully target your social demographic segment.

Step 6: select your campaign

If you’re creating your ads on the web interface, click on “create a new campaign” and make sure you either change your budget to “lifetime budget” or change your daily budget to £1.00. This will ensure you don’t overspend your budget mistakenly. I’ve had to keep stressing myself to make these changes as I have had to endure some painful lessons in the past.

Step 7: set your bid and place your order

Once the demographic targeting is done, set your bid to £0.01. You set the bid so low because there’s no way to pause ads until after you’ve placed your order. Placing your bid at £0.01 will almost guarantee your ads won’t display and spend your valuable budget.

Step 8: repeat above steps

Once you’ve completed the above steps, find the little green button at the top right hand corner of the page that reads “create an ad” and click it. Go through the above steps until you have a paused campaign with an ad for each segment in it. Hopefully none of your ads will be rejected. If they do, all you need to do is make the recommended changes and resubmit them.

Getting the account structure right

Now that you’ve got a basic structure in place, let’s discuss best practice campaign lay-out. Most clients want to test more than one ad’s creative to the same target audience. While it’s tempting to dump a lot of ads targeting various segments in one campaign bucket, the result can be a big mess. Unfortunately Facebook does not currently allow you to sort results by demographic group. So you can’t isolate performance of ads by gender, education, interest or other criteria with a few clicks. This needs to be done manually, so setting things up with a bit of foresight goes a long way.

Example 1: messy structure

Baseball campaign:

baseball bat ad
baseball ad
baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2
baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign:

basketball ad
basketball ad 2
basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign:

football boots ad
football boots ad 2
football ad

The problem with the above structure is that Facebook’s algorithm decides which ads in your campaign are served. I suspect the algorithm is more optimised for Facebook to maximise its profits than for you to get coverage across all your ads equally. Because Facebook automatically rotates through each active ad in a campaign, it’s really important that the algorithm is comparing apples to apples.

Example 2 : better structure

Baseball bat campaign -

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball campaign -

baseball ad
baseball ad 2

Baseball glove campaign -

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign -

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign -

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign -

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign -

football ad
football ad 2

Football boots campaign -

football boots ad
football boots ad

You could go even more granular:

Baseball bat campaign (age 18-24)

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball bat campaign (age 25-35)

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball campaign (age 18-24)

baseball ad
baseball ad 2

Baseball campaign (age 25-35)

- baseball ad
- baseball ad 2

Baseball glove campaign (age 18-24)

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball glove campaign (age 25-35)

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign (age 18-24)

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign (age 25-35)

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign (age 18-24)

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball campaign (age 25-35)

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign (age 18-24)

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign (age 25-35)

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign (age 18-24)

football ad
football ad 2

Football campaign (age 25-35)

football ad
football ad 2

Football boots campaign (age 18-24)

football boots ad
football boots ad 2

Football boots campaign (age 25-35)

football boots ad
football boots ad 2

The above structure will be very handy when you need to monitor performance and also to make sure your end of month reporting is fairly straightforward.

A/B Testing

I love what one of my previous bosses told me during an internship programme I was completing some time ago. He said in my role I am not allowed to hold an opinion. If I need to push something forward, I’d need to substantiate it with tangible facts. I find A/B testing a great way to substantiate my proposals and recommendations, such as which campaigns to allocate more budget to, what type of images do I want, what type of message tone works with users, which type of call-to-actions work best, what colours are users more receptive to etc. By using A/B testing, you can obtain actual numbers, which can help you in your decision-making process.

Therefore, it is extremely important that you test different headlines, switching body copy, testing different images etc. It’s important to test at least a couple of ads per campaign. But don’t overdo it with loads of ads at the same time. As mentioned above, Facebook’s not going to give each ad a true chance to perform at its best even in rotation but will skew toward an ad the algorithm perceives as successful.

What’s in a name?

The last tip is to make sure you name your campaigns logically. The last time I checked, Facebook’s web interface allows a user to sort campaigns by most columns, while power editor does not support sorting. The ‘all campaigns’ page defaults to an alphabetical sort by campaign name every single time the user returns back to ‘all campaigns’, even after another sorting column was chosen previously. This can be extremely frustrating, so planning your naming standard early on will save your heart from increased blood pressure.

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to naming conventions, but make sure they make sense to you when sorted alphabetically and that it also makes sense to someone who will work on the account in your absence. I generally use the following format as a guide -

[promotion name]-[product name]-[duration]-[special targeting metric]

e.g. Christmas deals – Trainers – 01 Dec/05 Dec 12 – males

Conclusion

The most essential take-away from this post is to plan ahead and be organised. Unless you use an in-house account management tool or you use a third party account management tool, managing Facebook campaigns can be fairly exhaustive. Hopefully the above tips will keep you in good stead. I’m sure you have some nuggets of wisdom to share too, so please feel free to leave your comments below.

Postscript

I received some constructive feedback after having published the above post and was notified by Leyla Arsan (@leyla_a) via twitter that I didn’t address a very important part of the whole campaign set-up process, namely URL tagging for conversion tracking. I also didn’t mention targeting ads to your existing Facebook fans and their friends, which I thought I should include too. So here are my #12 and #13 tips for a better Facebook campaign:

Tip #12: Conversion tracking
As with any PPC campaign, it is imperative that you set up conversion tracking in order to better gauge the success or failure of the campaigns you run. Like many PPC advertisers, I use Google Analytics in order to gain greater insight about the traffic I send via Facebook ads. The only problem is that Google Analytics can’t differentiate between referral and paid traffic sent via Facebook unless you tag your URLs with tracking codes. Google have very generously provided a URL builder that help you generate the tracking code to your landing page URLs. The only limitation with this tool is that it would be extremely time consuming if you have a large number of ads and landing page URLs. For this reason, I use our very own Daniel Bianchini’s Google docs spread sheet which lets you scale what the Google’s URL builder offer. This spread sheet has saved me loads of precious time, so I do urge you to use it. Here’s where you could find the spread sheet: http://goo.gl/jI1Wd
If you want more guidance on using the spread sheet click here to get to the original post.

Tip#13: Don’t forget your existing fans
With Facebook’s ‘premium ads and featured stories’ you can feature page posts on your brand pages as ads. This means that you can promote and advertise your content you post on your brand pages. This is quite a powerful channel to reach out and engage with your fans and their friends. The significance of this method of advertising is that you would be able to provide your target audience with an ad that is more engaging and less sale-sy. Also, you get to use not only text, but rich media such as images and videos. However, the key points to remember when setting campaigns that target your fans are:

1. The objective of the ‘premium ads’ campaign is to create brand awareness and increase the number of fans – or your fan rate. So you should avoid a sales approach in your core messaging.
2. If you are posting an image, make sure your page posts are up to 90 characters or less so they could be featured in its entirety on your ad. If it’s a page post with no rich media, then you can post up to 150 characters.
3. Since your target audience are fans and their friends, you might limit your reach (especially if you target sub-groups). However, it is still important to have a targeted audience with a decent enough number as Facebook wouldn’t display your ads if the target audience is too small.
4. Use your ‘page insights’ data to find what best geo locations to target your ads, and also to find which demographic segment are most receptive to your posts. This data should guide you when writing content for page posts.
5. Anecdotal evidence has shown that questions do tend to gain a fair amount of engagement: this also tends to work well when targeting those who are not already your fans.

Image credit: marcopako

What Could Google’s New Privacy Policy Mean for PPC?

Tamsin Mehew — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:33:59 +0000

Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies. The main changes are that:

Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy.
Information you give Google’s various different services can be combined.

Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.

According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.

And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:

Interest-based targeting may improve. Currently Google uses DoubleClick cookies to place users into interest categories based on the sites they visit – you can see what Google thinks you like here. The changes mean Google could infer interests from searches or Google+ activity as well, which should improve accuracy.
Demographics targeting might be available more widely. Currently targeting by age-group and gender is only an option on sites where users supply that information. But Google’s demographic information (from YouTube or Google+ accounts) could be used for targeting on other sites as well.
New ways of targeting Display Network advertising may appear. For example it could be possible to target people based on what Google Products they use – advertise Analytics training to Analytics users, say, or push Google+ users to circle your Google+ page.
New ways of targeting Google Search advertising may appear. AdCenter already allows targeting based on age-group and gender when advertising on Search: Google could do the same.
There will be even more changes to the SERPs – Google’s announcement says the change will let them “better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for”. But perhaps it will also add more than help with disambiguation, adding to the personalisation of the SERPs we’re already seeing with Search Plus Your World.

Have you any idea what Google is (or could be) planning? Share your thoughts in the comments.

How Is adCenter Different to AdWords?

Tamsin Mehew — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:08:41 +0000

So you’re advertising on Google, but you want to branch out to Bing? There’s a new audience for you there, with less competition and less cost!

Microsoft adCenter is in many ways similar to AdWords. Your ads appear on searches that match your positive keywords but not your negative keywords. Your account contains campaigns, which contain ad groups, which contain keywords and ads. Your ad’s position and the price of a click are determined by your bid and previous performance. But there are many differences – here are some of the most important ones for when you’re starting out.

Markets and Locations

In adCenter, there are separate options for Market and for Location. The Market determines what language you can use and which websites your ads appear on. Location determines where the users are.

So if your Market is ‘UK – English’, and you target all Locations, then your ads will appear on English websites like uk.msn.com to visitors from anywhere in the world. If the Market is ‘UK – English’ and the Location is United Kingdom, the ads will be on the same websites, but only visitors from the UK will see your ads.

The current Markets are USA (in English or Spanish), Canada (French or English), UK (English), France (English) and Singapore (English). You choose a campaign’s Market when you create the campaign, and it can’t be changed afterwards. Location can be set at campaign or ad group level, and can be changed at any time.

Learn more here.

Normalisation

All search terms and keywords – regardless of match type – are normalised. AdCenter will ignore CapITAlisAtion, áccents and most #punctuation. Note that plurals are left unchanged.

Apostrophes are treated differently to other punctuation. If an apostrophe appears in a name or in the middle of a word, it will be left, so “O’Brian” is different from “OBrian” or “O Brian”. If an apostrophe is used in a possessive, the non-possessive form will be used, e.g. “Keiko’s” is the same as “Keiko” but not “Keikos” or “Keiko s”.

Words like ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘what’, ‘for’ and ‘a’ are ignored. This means adCenter sees no difference between the searches “Keyword”, “How to Keyword” and “What is Keyword for?” – any of these terms can trigger an ad that has ‘Keyword’ on exact match. Negative keywords are normalised the same as positive ones, so you can’t stop this.

Microsoft’s explanation of normalisation is here.

Dynamic Text and Placeholders

In AdWords, you can use Dynamic Keyword Insertion to put terms from the search query into your ad. AdCenter has a similar feature, which allows extra information.

Firstly, you can put {keyword} into your ad, and this will be replaced by the triggered keyword when the ad appears.

Secondly, adCenter will let you give your keywords three Placeholder parameters, which can then be inserted into adverts. You might have keywords that are misspellings, and use a Placeholder for the correct spelling to appear in the advert. Or you could have keywords for different products, and use Placeholders for their price or special offer information.

Microsoft’s help page for dynamic text is here.

And Some More…

Negative keywords can be phrase or exact match, but not broad. Positive keywords can be broad match, phrase match or exact match (although broad match is a bit less broad than it is in AdWords).

AdCenter has demographic data available on searchers logged into Microsoft or MSN accounts. This means there are demographic targeting options, where you can exclude or change bids based on age group or gender. You can also get age group and gender reports.

AdCenter gives search query reports (available in the Report tab), but they do not give search query information for search terms that generate no clicks. The number of impressions given is not the actual number of impressions for a search term; adCenter only reports the number of impressions that occurred within an hour of a click.

SEOptimise’s 58 most awesome blog posts of 2011

Matthew Taylor — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:32:20 +0000

*
2011 has been another very busy year on the SEOptimise blog, with nearly 400 posts generating over 400,000 visits and well in excess of half a million pageviews (oh and one best blog award).

With the year drawing to a close, and Christmas just round the corner, I thought it would be a great opportunity to try and summarise the best and most popular posts of the year, and hopefully give you a few early SEO Christmas gifts. While I am personally not a fan of list posts, judging by the most popular posts a lot of you are. So ever eager to please, here is a list of the 58 best/most popular posts of the year.

Our 10 most popular posts

What better place to start than the most popular posts of the year? Between them, the posts below generated almost 100,000 pageviews. So, working on the basis that 100,000 people (ok, maybe not people) can’t be wrong, there must be some awesome SEO gems contained within them.

30 Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011 – the first post of the year is also the most popular, with Tad’s post about what was going to happen to search and social in 2011 receiving over 17,000 pageviews. As you would expect, there were a few predications that didn’t come true, but a fair few that did.

30 Ways to Use Social Media for Business People – with businesses seemingly falling over themselves to become more social, it’s good to know what you can use it for, and this post rounds it up.
30 (New) Google Ranking Factors You May Over- or Underestimate – a one-stop guide to some of the more misunderstood Google ranking factors: link decay anyone?
What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours? – this post got a fair few mentions at conferences, on other blog posts and even in the mainstream media. While the answer may seem obvious, you never know until you try, and Marcus did.
30 (New) SEO Terms You Have to Know in 2011 – this was the most shared post on our blog in 2011 and, amongst other things, told everyone what a content farm is shortly before Google tried to destroy them all. Still, there are always the 29 other terms.
High Risk SEO: 33 Ways to Get Penalised by Google – a post that summarises ways to get penalised by Google. Best used as a “how not to guide”, but I’m fairly sure people will still try a few and cross their fingers.
36 Must-Read Local SEO/Google Places Resources from 2010/2011 – with Local and Places results becoming ever more prominent in the SERPs, it’s best to know how to master them. This post did the hard work and aggregated lots of the best sources for you.
30 Web Trends for 2012: How SEO, Search, Social Media, Blogging, Web Design & Analytics Will Change – despite only being published in late November this still made the top 10 list. Judging by the accuracy of the one Tad did for 2011, it’s probably worth a read.
Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes & Tweets? – there was a lot of talk earlier in 2011 about the potential use of social signals in Google’s algorithm, so Marcus tried to find out if there was anything to back up the chat by experimenting.
30 Link Building/Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011 – With the Panda update (potentially) devaluing a lot of low quality links, Tad refreshed our memory about some of the great link building tactics that are still available.

The 20 posts that got you sharing

The later half of the year has all been about one thing – social media, largely fuelled by Google’s latest attempt at social media, Google+. Bearing this in mind, we had to check what got our readers sharing during 2011.

30 New SEO Terms You Have To Know in 2011 – shared 1,510 times
30 Ways To Use Social Media for Business People – shared 1,284 times
30 Web Trends For 2012: How SEO Search Social Media Blogging Web Design Analytics Will Change – shared 890 times
30 New Google Ranking Factors You May Over or Underestimate – shared 678 times
How To Write a Social Media Audit – shared 599 times
Can You Get a New Domain Ranking Using Just Facebook Likes Tweets – shared 597 times
High Risk SEO 33 – Ways To Get Penalised by Google – shared 582 times
30 Link Building & Link Baiting Techniques That Work in 2011 – shared 406 times
What Makes a Real SEO Expert – shared 404 times
30 Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners – shared 397 times
30 Efficient Web Tools That Save Time and Make Money For Power Users – shared 369 times
30 Google SERP Changes that Impact Your SEO Strategy – shared 357 times
157 Awesome PubCon 2011 Takeaways – shared 346 times
What Happens When You Build 10,000 Dodgy Links to a New Domain in 24 Hours – shared 322 times
30 Web Trends You Have To Know About in 2011 – shared 285 times
Google Dropping Analytics Keyword Data: What Does This Mean – shared 273 times
30 SEO Myths That Are True or False Depending on Who You Ask – shared 247 times
30 Ways To Optimise Your Site for Speed – shared 235 times
Experiment Do Google+1S Impact Your Rankings – shared 229 times
Social Media Why an SEO Background is Better Than PR – shared 229 times

The three best experiments of the year

Due to the secrecy behind Google’s algorithm, a lot of popular SEO theory is based on anecdotal evidence and guess work. But, every so often Marcus, our resident SEO mad scientist, likes to don his lab coat shark outfit, lock himself away and get experimenting. Below are three of his best experiments from 2011 (no animals were harmed during the making of these posts – but a few sites were).

The 10 greatest SEO tool posts

The one thing common to all SEOs is that we like our tools, whether it’s to crawl a site or just optimise it. In the SEOptimise office we like to try everything out, and the good news for you is that we love to write about them too. So here are the 10 greatest posts about SEO tools we wrote this year.

10 awesome SEO conference posts

As an agency we get like to go to and talk at as many conferences as we can (especially if they are in Vegas). But we also know that not everyone can go to them all, and even if you do there is a lot to remember, so we always try our best to post a round-up of the stuff we hear. So below I have summarised our 10 most viewed conference related posts.

Five wicked polls

We love a good bit of crowdsourcing in the SEOptimise office, and we are very lucky that we have followers who like to get involved and share their opinions. Here are five of the best and most interesting polls we ran this year.

So these are our greatest hits of the year, hope you all found some cool stuff. Next year there will be more of the same, plus hopefully a few more video blogs as well. If there are any blogs that we haven’t included but you think deserve a mention, let me know in the comments section.

Finally, we are always happy to take requests, so if you want us to blog about something in particular you can add those to the comments too.

*Image credit: negatendo on Flickr (I had to use a cat picture once this year).

The Ultimate Guide to Securing a Job in Social Media, SEO & PPC

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:01:19 +0000

There are many misconceptions about the kind of skills and traits you need in order to find a job within the Search Engine and Social Media Marketing Industry (hereinafter referred to as ‘SE & SMM Industry’). In order to dispel most of these misconceptions and to provide a guide-like resource to anyone looking to make their first step into the world of search and social, I have listed eight tips that would keep you in good stead in your job search including how to answer the dreaded “what prior experience do you have in Search and Social Media Marketing?” question.

Tip # 1 – Turn the darn news off!

How many of us have heard of how bleak the current climate is in terms of employment for new graduates? Almost every day I see depressing stats thrown about on news sites. So please do yourself a favour and turn a Nelsonian eye on all the negativity regarding current unemployment levels. Why is this important? It’s important because you reflect the state you’re in to potential employers. You want to portray the best version of ‘you’ to them. Negative stories on the media only reinforce the belief that you will not secure a job (which obviously isn’t true).

Tip #2 – Learn industry jargon

The first thing that intimidates most people from absolutely anything is the unfamiliarity of a situation, a place or a group. This is true for the SE & SMM industry as well. We tend to use a lot of industry jargon to sound cleverer than we actually are. So for anyone not familiar with commonly used phrases and terms, this industry may seem quite intimidating.

For example read the following terms:

rel=”canonical”
Sitemaps
301 redirect
Panda update
GWT
Robots.txt

If you don’t have a clue about what these words mean don’t think, “Oh man! This industry isn’t for me!” rather, make a note of these terms and find out their meanings. In times like these, the mantra I take solace in is “every expert was once a beginner”. So even today, there are times when I end up at meetings where I don’t understand what some people say. The key is to not be intimidated but to learn these terms and learn them quick. The beauty of this industry is that everyone’s constantly learning, including the ‘experts’. This is important to know especially when you start off because you will hear lots of new terms and words that are unfamiliar to you. So be comfortable in being in the realm of the unknown and enjoy the exciting but steep learning curve ahead of you.

Tip #3 – Start networking early!

Our Director of search, Kevin Gibbons, mentioned that he met final year university students at Pubcon (a search conference held in Vegas) recently, who were walking around meeting industry leaders and handing out business cards. They were networking even before finding a job, so make sure you attend industry events or even local networking events and build relationships with people within the industry. Once you’ve met with them make sure you continue fostering the relationship via Twitter and LinkedIn.

Tip #4 – Ask and you shall receive:

This links with the previous tip; once you’ve networked and met someone influential within the industry don’t go “could you give me/find me a job please?”, rather ask the right questions. Ask questions about current roles that are in demand, or what skills are valued the most and what’s hot within the industry right now? These questions will give you greater insights into the skills that are in demand and will help you focus on a particular role to go after.

Tip #5 – Find your niche that match your strengths

If you ask me what the best thing about working in the SE & SMM industry is, I’d say it’s the diversity of the individuals who make up this industry. Surprisingly not all of us are geeks, technical, or even tech savvy but we’re good at what we specialise in. no one can be amazing at everything, so there are niches within this big umbrella called Digital Marketing or eMarketing. If you take the SEOptimise team as an example, you will find some with degrees in computer science, business development, classical archaeology & ancient history, physics & philosophy, mathematics, mechanical engineering, business management and the list goes on. So if your degree has absolutely nothing to do with computers, it is perfectly fine! I believe this industry is big enough to accommodate your skills and talents.

Tip #6 – Leverage your existing skills

If you’ve got any of the following skills, make sure you highlight them in your CV:

You have web development and design skills – this is the most natural transition into the world of Search and Social Media. Simply because you know what it takes to build a site, so it’s only logical that you learn how to promote your site to your target audience. Most often these people you target are either searching for something on Google/Bing/Yahoo/Baidu or passing their time on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn. So the very basic objective of Search and Social Media Marketing is to make sure your website is in the faces of these people.

You are analytical – you love statistics, you love mathematics, you love excel then you might enjoy PPC or Paid Search. This is where you pay search engines and social media platforms to display your adverts and promote your brand, service or any offering.

Writing is your passion – the SEO industry is waking up to the fact that quality content is integral to all marketing activities. Big brands are taking web content really seriously! So if you love writing really engaging, thought provoking, high quality content then you can enter this industry as a copywriter. Tom Critchlow went to the extent of suggesting that every company should appoint a ‘chief content officer’ to manage and maintain quality web content.

You are creative and think out of the box – this trait can be useful in a number of ways. You could be creative in coming up with really interesting blog posts, you could come up with really creative ways of doing link building that others haven’t thought of. If you love expressing your creativity through art or graphics, you could be really good at creating and designing infographics. More importantly you could come up with loads of creative ideas for SEO, PPC or Social Media campaigns (as you would in an advertising agency).

You are a software engineer and programming is your thing – the SEO industry is always looking for new and innovative software and tools to be built in order to make their day to day work easier. So when you network with people within the SE & SMM industry be sure to ask “what kind of tools would you like built to make you work more efficiently?” find out what these are and build them. If you can go to an interview and say you built a tool that your friend (or an agency) uses to manage their Facebook ad campaigns or it helped them manage SEO projects efficiently, I can assure you the agency will be quite interested in you. Having someone in-house to develop tools that improve efficiency and productivity is a competitive advantage for any agency.

If you are a people person – you love a good social gathering and love meeting new people, or you are really good at picking up the phone and striking conversations with strangers, then you could get into link building and do some serious ‘blogger outreach’ activities. Link building is probably the most difficult and time consuming activity in SEO. Therefore, it helps if you are a natural hustler. And trust me; your skills will be worth its weight in gold!

At the top of my head, these were the skills that came to mind, if I have missed anything please do pop down to the comments and share with us what other skills that you think can fit into this massive puzzle called the SE & SMM industry.

Tip #7 – Find out what employers are looking for

Some very famous people within the industry have listed what they look for in a candidate in the post titled How To Recruit An SEO – The SEO Industry Leaders Reveal Their Secrets which I urge you to read. Bear in mind this particular post is aimed at people with a little more experience within the industry, having said that, it’s still a good idea to learn about the thought process of those who actually hire you.

Tip #8 – Answering the dreaded “so what experience do you have in SE & SMM?” question

OK so you must be thinking this is all well and fine. But every time I apply for a job they ask me what experience I have. How do I gain experience if I don’t get an opportunity to build experience? This is actually a great question and I completely share your frustration. But the beauty of the SE & SMM industry is that you don’t need to hold a job or a position in order to demonstrate your skills in SEO, PPC or social media. Yes, you read that right!

Here are some ways you can demonstrate hands on experience:

Be an active member in clubs and societies at university

While at university join a club or a society and put yourself up to be part of these committees. Or if you don’t find any club interesting, you could go ahead and start your own club. Setup a Facebook page and a twitter page and start managing it. This experience will give you loads of insight into how difficult it is to actually manage and promote a Facebook page. Get familiar with tools like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, learn how to schedule tweets, test out what works on social media and what doesn’t. If you could go into an interview and say I set up a Facebook page for my club and increased its fans from virtually none to 856 within 6 months and list out the activities you undertook in order to increase these numbers, I can assure you they’d be well impressed.

Don’t forget volunteer work, internships and work experience roles

I know there is debate about interns not getting paid and whether it’s ethical or even legal to not get paid for work experience. I shall not comment on the politics or the legality of this practice in this post, but in my case I worked two internships before landing my proper role within the SE & SMM industry. My first internship role was unpaid and the second paid me a very small wage! So at one point I worked two jobs at the same time and worked about 70 hours a week! One job gave me the necessary skills for my career and the second paid my bills. In no way am I encouraging you to follow in my footsteps (seriously, I was out of my mind!) but the fact that I took on internship roles that were directly related to the career I wanted to pursue, helped me look attractive to potential employers. So don’t ever write off doing volunteer and internship roles. Any experience that is relevant is good experience!

Go around asking SMEs if they need a hand with SE & SMM

Recently a couple of friends asked me what they could do to demonstrate their skills in social media. I advised that they go out and find ultra-local businesses such as restaurants, pubs and cafes and suggest setting up Facebook and Twitter profiles for these businesses and offer to manage these. Local business owners don’t have the time to invest in social media and probably even don’t see the point in it. If you can convince them that it’s a great way to retain customers and win new ones, chances are they will let you be their social media guy. Also speak to local charities and offer to do some volunteer work and devise plans on how you could help their fundraising activities through social media. Also make sure to organise events at university and use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to promote them. All this is work experience and makes your CV look good to potential employers.

Make sure you blog (especially if you want a role as a copywriter)

If you want to get into SE&SMM as a copy writer, make sure you blog regularly and build a decent following. Write about subjects that excite you or are passionate about, such as reviewing movies, albums, books, restaurants and events. Show you can blog about different subject areas and build relationships with other bloggers. One industry where SEO, PPC and Social Media are integral to the success of their business is the travel industry. So make sure you write about traveling, hotels, countries and cities in an exciting and engaging way. Also it would be advantageous if you could demonstrate your ability to write copy in a completely different style to that of your own. This is because most often you will be writing on topics that may be alien to you.

You have your own website

If you know how to develop and design websites, then a really good way to demonstrate first-hand SEO skills is to set up your own website and implement SEO techniques. Test different title tags, landing pages and link building efforts and see how they affect search engines rankings, traffic etc. also include social elements such as the many Facebook, Twitter and Google+ sharing features. Set up Google Analytics, Google webmaster tools and Bing webmaster tools to your site and familiarise yourself with these interfaces and their features. Again, these are all demonstrable skills that are extremely valued by employers. The idea is to show you’re keen, enthusiastic and hungry to learn and improve your skills.

Some words of wisdom from people within the industry:

I asked around from active members of the SE & SMM industry what advice they’d give to someone embarking on a career in this industry. Here’s what they said:

“The biggest piece of advice I can give is two-fold. Always be learning and get involved in the community. There’s so much to learn about search every day and the community is invaluable, people are so helpful and generous and very interesting because so many people came into SEO from so many different backgrounds. It’s a ton of fun to meet and learn from so many diverse people. Don’t ever let your skills get dusty, always test, always challenge what you’ve learned and always be open to learning from other people.” – Michael King (aka iPullRank).

“From my experience, graduates who are looking for jobs in this sector must be able to display some key attributes. Presence on the web – a Facebook profile alone isn’t enough. You have to be active on Twitter, LinkedIn etc. also it’s essential to have some other sort of project. It could be a Youtube channel, a blog or a website. Something you can show that you have an explicit interest in. Once you’ve got your first job you’re going to learn so much. Until then, its enthusiasm that’s going to get you the job you want.” – Gillian Cook

“I would suggest setting up a site of your own and doing SEO for it. It will mean you can demonstrate understanding and you get to have a play. Also, use one of the free AdWords vouchers to learn PPC. I would also consider doing the Analytics and AdWords exams as they aren’t greatly expensive and will give you a really good technical start.” – Matthew Taylor

“Employers can be a lot more selective in their recruitment process nowadays, and as a result, are always on the lookout for the candidates who have something extra to offer. Look for work experience whilst studying; put it on your CV. Look for ways to practice things in your own time; put it on your CV. Just get something that makes you look better on paper than the people around you.” - Daniel Braddock

Here are some additional resources:

beginners guide to SEO: a must read if you are new to SEO.

The Ultimate Guide to Getting a Job & Getting Promoted by Marcus Taylor.

How To Interview for an SEO Job by Chelsea Blacker.

How to impress at an SEO interview by Kevin Gibbons

SEO and Social Media leaders to follow on Twitter, Facebook, Google+….

As with any industry, the SE & SMM industry have within its niche its own experts who have reached celebrity-like status. I have listed some of the biggest names within the industry here as you’re sure to hear their names regularly in conversation with SEOs and Social Media Marketers.

Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land)
Matt Cutts (Google)
Vanessa Fox (Nine By Blue)
Aaron Wall (SEOBook)
Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz)
Danny Dover (author of SEO secrets)
Richard Baxter (SEOgadget)
Michael King (aka iPullRank)
Will Critchlow (Distilled)
Brian Solis (Altimeter)
Chris Brogan
Jay Baer
Scott Monty (Ford)
David Armano (Edleman)

Conclusion

I’ve tried to make this post as comprehensive and as useful to you as possible. However, if I have missed something, please do feel free to pop down to the comments section and add anything you think is relevant to the topic.

Finally, I wish you all the very best in your job search in the SE & SMM industry. I leave you with one last quote from Richard Baxter who was asked by Matthew Ogston what he bases his decision on when hiring someone new; his head or his heart?

“Most definitely my heart. It’s probably not ideal but genuinely, I look out for people I think will blend in well with the team (a cultural fit) – this can’t be measured with facts and figures, at least not in my experience. Obviously there’s a requirement to demonstrate previous achievements, but I also look for raw intelligence and problem solving over experience. SEO I can teach, attitude and aptitude I cannot.” (emphasis mine)

*Image credit: Tulane Public Relations on Flickr.

8 Best Ways to Find Negative PPC Keywords

Tamsin Mehew — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 11:28:05 +0000

If your ads display on irrelevant searches, then either you get clicks and waste money (as the searchers are very unlikely to convert), or you don’t get clicks and CTR drops (which affects Quality Score and therefore your CPC).

So how do you stop this? Part of the answer is choosing keywords carefully – be careful with general terms and use modified broad-match where appropriate – but for the best performance possible you need negative keywords to target your traffic properly.

1. Search Query Reports
The most obvious way, but also the most important. Look at your search query report and see what terms your ad is actually displaying for.

Look for patterns. See if there are repeated words or themes that are irrelevant. For example, say you sell red shoes, and as such have ‘buy red shoes’ as a keyword on broad match. If phrases like ‘buy blue shoes’ and ‘blue shoes for sale’ appear in your search query report then adding ‘blue’ on broad-match negative rather than excluding the searches individually with exact match is preferable: not only will it exclude the searches you’ve noticed, but it also excludes long tail searches you haven’t seen.

This may be a simplistic example, but you might spot a trend in your search queries that leads to other new negative keywords. Seeing ‘blue’ may make you think to exclude other colours. Seeing ‘jobs’ may make you think to exclude ‘recruitment’.

Also try to think about what the searcher is looking for with their query. Is the search term actually the name of a book or film? You may want to search for stranger terms on Google yourself to make sense of them.

2. Use Someone Else’s List
Some negatives come up all the time, so it can help to look at something like KoMarketing Associates’s list of negative keywords for inspiration. Don’t add terms to your account without thinking – some might be relevant for you! – but it is a good starting point.

3. Use Keyword Research Tools
Google’s Keyword Tool shows you what Google thinks is relevant to your keywords, so if someone searches for a term it suggests it’s likely to display your ad. So see if you think the highest traffic suggestions are actually relevant, and if they aren’t then exclude them.

Something that scrapes Google Instant suggestions (like Über Suggest) can also give you ideas of popular searches that start with your keywords, to include or exclude as you see fit.

4. Your Positive Keywords
You’ve worked hard to structure your account, sort keywords into the best possible ad groups, and write adverts specially tailored to those groups. You don’t want to lose this work by having searches display the wrong ads.

If you’ve got a general ad group for ‘red shoes’ and a more specific ad group for ‘shiny red shoes’ you’ll want to exclude ‘shiny’ from the former so that it doesn’t steal the latter’s traffic. Making sure searches go to the most specific ad group possible means that they see the most specific ad possible. Also, it’s easier to track performance – you can’t as easily tell how well ‘shiny red shoes’ searches perform if they are split over multiple ad groups and mixed up with other terms.

5. Competitor Research
Whether you should bid on competitor terms is beyond the scope of this post, but even if you do then you should keep them separated from your other keywords (as searches with a brand attached will behave differently to searches with no brand at all), and so competitor terms should be used as negative keywords. Don’t just think of the brand name: think of their product names as well.

If you know of brands who have a similar but different market you could exclude them as their audience will be uninterested in your product: for instance if you sell women’s clothing you could use as negative keywords brands who specialise in men’s clothing.

6. Analytics
Looking at Analytics gives you behavioural information on searchers for some keywords, although this is limited to keywords you already rank for organically and people who found your site relevant enough to visit (and soon it will exclude people who search Google while logged in). If there is a keyword with high traffic and no conversions, then it could be a good negative keyword.

7. Monitor the Media
Using social media monitoring or Google alerts can show if your brand terms have uses unrelated to you which you didn’t previously know about.

Another thing to bear in mind is that you never know when there will be news or a trend that’s related to your keywords but not your business – and that could be expensive if there’s a sudden explosion of searches that your advert appears on. If you advertise in the travel vertical, for example, then you may need to react to disasters and current events in destination countries, either by adding negative keywords or (in extreme cases) pausing ad groups.

8. Misspelings adn Typiong Mistaakes
People don’t have to type carefully into search engines or use precise spellings – they may even be searching to find the right spelling! So you should expect there to be searches with misspellings and typos. If you have ‘cheap’ as a negative keyword, even on broad-match, you can still find your ads appearing on searches for things that are ‘chep’ or ‘ceap’ or ‘chap’. So when you’ve found an important negative keyword you may want to think of its misspellings too. Typo generators can help.

59% Say ROI from Google AdWords Remarketing Outweighs its Annoyance

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:41:10 +0000

Earlier in the week I ran a poll to ask if people thought Google AdWords remarketing was a great marketing tactic, or just annoying.

There’s often many mixed opinions when talking about this, which fall into two groups:

People who find that they are constantly being re-marketed to and almost stalked across the web, often to the point that it puts them off making a future purchase from a brand because the ads are so annoying.
Advertisers who find that AdWords remarketing yields a positive ROI and is a great marketing tactic to re-connect with potential customers, who didn’t quite make a purchase last time they visited your site – but are likely to in the future.

So I thought it would be useful to run a quick poll to see how these opinions are divided, here are the results:

Your browser doesn’t support iFrames :( Vote for this poll here.

So it’s pretty split (exactly 50/50 if you only look at UK results) – but based on this, it’s clear that despite many people finding the ads annoying – most appreciate that it is a very useful and effective method of advertising towards potential customers.

Some of the replies I received on Twitter do a great job of summing this up:

@kevgibbo Why the dichotomy? They are annoying AND effective.

October 4, 2011 8:53 am via Twitter for Mac ReplyRetweetFavorite

@benjaminellis

Benjamin Ellis

@seoptimise @kevgibbo I think the annoyance level of remarketing depends on how frequent you let the ads be shown - http://t.co/DOQE2GfU

October 3, 2011 4:21 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@BrionyGunson

Briony Gunson

@kevgibbo I imagine it's like this: Surprise > novelty > complacency > irritation > annoyance > fear > death #remarketing #ppc

October 3, 2011 4:28 pm via TweetDeck ReplyRetweetFavorite

@BrionyGunson

Briony Gunson

@kevgibbo its like most things in SEM; done badly is harmful, done well is profitable

October 4, 2011 9:01 am via Ada ReplyRetweetFavorite

@RichardFergie

Richard Fergie

So while remarketing can be annoying, it depends largely on how you manage your campaign – and in some cases we just have to accept it’s both useful and annoying!

Facebook Insights for Domains – Measuring Social Media Success

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:45:22 +0000

When social media marketers ran Facebook campaigns that were aimed at driving traffic toward their websites, they had to resort to tools such as Google Analytics in order to measure success or failure of their Facebook campaigns. However, a nifty new addition to the Facebook arsenal is the ‘insights for domains’ feature which has been introduced with minimum fanfare by Facebook. I strongly believe that if you run Facebook campaigns for your website then this is a ‘must have’ tool in order to monitor and optimise your Facebook content consumption.

We tested it out on our website for a couple of months and the information we have been able to gather has not only been extremely insightful, but also helped make better decisions regarding social media marketing strategies and tactics when running Facebook campaigns. This is indeed a phenomenal development, and one that we thought should be elaborated.

Getting started

In order to set up insights for websites, you will need to associate your website with a Facebook page or app that you manage. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click on the green button that reads “insights for your website”.

This will generate a meta tag that will need to be placed within your tags. You then need to provide access to a user, the admins of a page or the admins of an application.

Once set up is complete you can get on to the main ‘insights for domains’ interface, where you are presented with an overview of your site’s engagement with users.

Here you are presented with the number of times Facebook users have posted a link to your site on their friend’s ‘wall’, their ‘status updates’ or through a ‘social plugin’ on your website. This information helps gauge how effective your social media campaigns are. You are also provided with the number of impressions where you can note how many people viewed the particular post. Finally you are provided with the number of referral traffic sent to your site, arguably the most important metric among the three as it shows how effective the content actually is in gaining traffic to your site.

What is quite fascinating about Facebook insights for domains is that when you view statistics of a particular day, you can view activity by the hour! The picture below illustrates that most amount of activity occurred on Wednesday 3^rd of August 2011 at 8am.

The ‘like’ button tree view on the left of your page lets you collapse the menu to see stats for your ‘like’ button. It provides figures of user behaviour for those users who viewed the like buttons on your website and the actions they took.

You also get the click through rate for the ‘like’ button and also the click through rates for the likes you receive on your stories you share on Facebook. You can also access information about the number of likes you gain based on demographics and geographical locations. Furthermore, you can view the most ‘liked’ content on your website.

The metric which is probably the most important in my opinion, is ‘organic shares’. This provides information of the number of people who actually share your link on their wall or status. The more organic shares you get, the greater the likelihood of it going viral. As a social media marketer, the goal and challenge is to increase this number.

Having browsed through the plethora of information Facebook ‘insights for domains’ offer, what does all this mean for social media marketing? Well firstly, it solves a longstanding limitation of social media promotion as it now provides measurable and quantifiable numbers of traffic sent over to your website through Facebook and the ‘method’ or ‘channel’ it was sent through (organic shares, likes, sent directly to friends, through posted comments etc.). Also it is possible to monitor what content of your website is shared more often through Facebook and you could replicate similar content. Furthermore, you can target content specifically for the most receptive gender, age group and geographical locations which in itself should be enough information to fine tune your social media marketing strategies and tactics.

If you are a social media marketer, this tool not only helps with reporting and decision making, but is a thermometer for your Facebook marketing campaigns – helping you study the social media effectiveness and health of your campaigns.

9 Ways to Sharpen Up Your Paid Search

Tamsin Mehew — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:16:56 +0000

If you’re already using paid search marketing, how can you improve your results? Here are nine tips for sharpening up your campaigns.

Use conversion tracking & Google Analytics
Which keywords produce what results? Which cause people to make purchases, which result in newsletter sign-ups, which drive traffic to your forum or blog? You need tracking to answer these questions. AdWords (or AdCenter) will tell you what ads searchers click, but it won’t say what they do when they get to your site.

If you don’t have any conversion tracking installed yet, then install it. AdWords and AdCenter have their own conversion tracking, which records a conversion when someone who clicked on an ad subsequently visits a page on your site with conversion tracking code. This is usually a ‘thank you’ page for a sign up, or a receipt page after a purchase – it depends on your website’s goals.

Having Google Analytics is in some ways better than just conversion tracking, as it can tell you about the behaviour of visitors who didn’t convert. Analytics tells you which keywords result in bounces, which pages searchers visit and how long they stay on site. If you’ve got an e-commerce site, you want Analytics for its e-commerce tracking – then you can link keywords to the revenue they generate (and so calculate their ROI).

If you’re not using Google AdWords, you can still use Google Analytics: use URL tagging to pass along information on keywords and ads.

It doesn’t matter what quality score, CPC or CTR a keyword has if nothing happens when the searchers reach your website. With conversion tracking you can tell if keywords give results – and then all the other metrics matter, as they help you maximise the results and minimise the cost.

Use a trail of keywords
Your mission is to make it easy for the searcher to click, land and convert. The searcher’s intent is shown in their search term, so you want to use that same term both in your ad copy and on the landing page. That makes it simple for the searcher to see how relevant your website is, and avoids getting them frustrated and clicking away. Also the call-to-action in your ad should reflect the language on the landing page, to reinforce the message of what the searcher should do.

Highlight your best deal
You only have a small space in your ad in which to get searchers’ notice, so make sure you really hook their attention. Lead with your unique selling point or a special offer. If you have a great price for the product they’ve searched for then include it (and make sure this product and price is prominent in the ad’s landing page). This will encourage them to spend time looking around your website.

Test your copy
It’s not just the success of your keywords you should be continuously assessing. The ad copy dictates whether or not someone will click on it, and also sets the tone for the visit to your website. Test different ad copy for your keywords and make sure your words are working for you. You can also try to save costs by prequalifying traffic with your ad text: mention price information or the intended audience (e.g. “for small business”) to avoid clicks from people who will not convert.

Improve your quality score and relevance
If you’re using Google AdWords, then a higher quality score will give you a higher ad rank, which means that you’ll get better ad position or cheaper clicks. Of course, improving quality score isn’t straightforward. Google does not say precisely how they calculate it, nor how they measure ‘relevance’. The column labelled ‘Quality Score’ in AdWords isn’t true quality score – that depends on the combination of keyword, ad and search term and is recalculated at every search – but it does give an indication of which keywords need attention. The main factor of Google’s quality score is click through rate.

(If you’re using Microsoft AdCenter, quality score doesn’t affect ad position, but if it’s too low it will limit the eligibility of your ads to be served. Again, CTR is one of the main factors.)

Improve CTR by making sure your keywords are as relevant as possible to your website. Check search query reports and use negative keywords to get rid of irrelevant searches. Try splitting bigger ad groups into smaller, more tightly targeted ad groups with highly tailored ad text.

Use niche keywords
The obvious keywords may have large search volumes, but they also have high competition and high CPC. By advertising around more niche keywords and phrases, you can drive far more relevant traffic to your pages and often pay less. There are several tools to help if you’re stuck for words to start testing: WordStream’s Keyword Niche Finder is designed especially for the task, but you can also use the Google Keyword Tool or Übersuggest for free if you don’t mind the results being less well organised. You can also find ideas from search query reports, if you have keywords on broad or phrase match – this has the advantage that you have a more accurate idea of the search term’s CPC.

Of course, you have to use your judgement and knowledge of your site to make sure the niche is suitable! If a keyword isn’t relevant but get lots of impressions, then use it as a negative keyword to keep the unwanted searches away.

Go local
This may not be relevant for all business, but for some it is an opportunity to get clicks from very targeted potential customers.

You can geotarget with geographical search terms – for example, advertising around ‘Oxford SEO’ instead of ‘SEO’. This is a sort of niche keyword, as above: these keywords are likely to be both better targeted and cheaper, maximising your returns.

An alternative is to set up a geotargeted campaign to only display in your locale, where you can afford to bid higher as the searchers are more likely to convert.

Even if you don’t think your website would benefit from targeting local searches, you can still check to see if there are areas with high impressions and good conversion rates – use the Geographic view in the Dimensions.

Expand
If you’ve got a campaign in your account which is doing well but is losing impression share from a restrictive daily budget, then give it a more money. If you’ve got keywords which get high conversion rates but low CTR because of bad positions, raise the bids to improve their positions and see if they continue to convert.

If your paid search is working well and delivering a good return, then it’s time to consider upping your game by increasing your spend. If your business has the capacity to increase turnover then you should consider growing an existing successful pay-per-click campaign.

Analyse and test, test and analyse
Small businesses with no dedicated search marketer often set up advertising around a set of keywords and then ignore it. But a good paid search campaign is constantly monitored, tweaked and sharpened in order to maximise the returns. Even just a few hours every week or two can really make a difference.

SEOs – time to brush up on your grammar?

Rachel McCombie — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:27:35 +0000

As a self-confessed grammar geek, I’m frequently dismayed by the sloppy standard of writing I am continually confronted with throughout the course of the seven days a week I spend exploring the weird and wonderful world wide web. Whether it’s a blog post, a tweet or even a company website, it seems that a lax approach to grammar has become the norm – even, most shockingly of all, among professional copywriters I’ve hired. The most frequent offender in the huge array of rudimentary English errors is the misplaced or missing apostrophe, a grammar violation which winds me up so much that Stuart Tofts and Kevin Gibbons make a point of including one in every email they send me, just so that they can see my reaction.

Before you ask, no – “Trampoline” is not the name of the shop!

Not long ago, in a moment of above average exasperation, I sent out a tweet which said:

So imagine my satisfaction when the following correction from Google was brought to my attention not long after:

We’re all used to Google correcting misspellings, but this was the first time I had seen it suggest correct punctuation. Interestingly, it has not automatically displayed results for “women’s clothing” with a different option for “search instead for womens clothing”, as it usually does with misspellings. Furthermore, doing the same search but for “mens” and “childrens” did not produce a “Did you mean” suggestion.

A quick glance down the search results for the search seen above showed sites with title tags using both correct and incorrect punctuation ranking for both terms (though title tags are obviously not the only consideration!). However, changing the search from “womens” to “women’s” did change which websites appeared on the first page – so it does seem to have some bearing on rankings. The top ranking websites were the same, but lower on the first page the results were different – meaning that some sites (Debenhams, for example) lost out on a first page ranking. The humble apostrophe makes a difference!

The Google Keyword Tool does recognise a small difference in search volumes for the two versions, but the number of searches for each is roughly equal. So why is Google making this correction in the search results?

This interesting video from Google shows the process used by Google engineers when they make algorithm changes – which they apparently do on a daily basis:

The video explains the rationale behind the “did you mean” suggestions: sites with misspellings are typically of a poorer quality. So as far as I can see, it’s a logical assumption that sites with a poor standard of grammar should be treated with the same approach.

In the light of the Panda update, we’re all getting used to the idea that Google is cracking down on low-quality sites, placing increasing emphasis on high-quality content that provides value for its users (the majority of whom are also Google’s users). Of course, many people are lazy when it comes to typing terms into Google, and will omit punctuation such as apostrophes because it takes marginally less time to type, and because they feel it makes little difference. But I would argue that the presence of poor grammar on a website could end up being a negative quality indicator because it diminishes a user’s trust in that website.

Google does use comments from real users in addressing problems of identifying what counts as a low-quality website. See this excerpt from a Wired.com interview with Google:

Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site? Do you have to wind up defining low quality content?

Singhal: That’s a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem. We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.

Singhal: And based on that, we basically formed some definition of what could be considered low quality. In addition, we launched the Chrome Site Blocker [allowing users to specify sites they wanted blocked from their search results] earlier , and we didn’t use that data in this change. However, we compared and it was 84 percent overlap [between sites downloaded by the Chrome blocker and downgraded by the update]. So that said that we were in the right direction.

The incorporation of user feedback into algorithms was also confirmed on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Personally, if I visit a company website and the first thing I notice is that it’s riddled with poor grammar, it puts me right off that company. My most likely course of action would be to go back to the search results and find a competitor with a well-written website – and I know I’m not alone in this.

I lament falling standards of English and argue that proper use of grammar DOES matter. Poor grammar is unprofessional and makes a company look sloppy, as though they just don’t care. If they have that kind of attitude towards their professional image – if they can’t even be bothered to get their English right – what might their attitude be to customer service? How can I trust them with my business? Google wants the best results for its users, websites they can place trust and confidence in – and part of that means companies who know how to present themselves in a professional way. It’s only one step from correcting misspellings to correcting grammar abuse.

So it’s certainly not impossible that Google may pay more careful attention to grammar in the future. If that happens, using an apostrophe or not could mean the difference between ranking competitively for a term and not; it could also mean that a PPC ad, with apostrophes dropped to keep within the character limit, might not appear on the searches you want it to appear on. If there are any algorithm updates involving grammar in the offing, they are still only in their infancy; but if you ask me, this would be a good time for online marketers to sharpen up their grammar skills and recommend that their clients do the same.

Image credit
Zawtowers on Flickr

Why Automating PPC Accounts Using APIs May Be a Bad Idea

Shaad Hamid — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:40:45 +0000

Automating Google Adwords accounts using APIs is a great way to save time and improve efficiency on large and complex accounts. However in my opinion, the success of paid search campaigns lies in understanding the marketing goals of the organisation, having an understanding of the products offered by the organisation, and having an understanding of the target market. This information acts as a guide when researching highly relevant keywords, creating ‘quality score friendly’ keyword segmentations and generating compelling ad copy that communicates the product offerings clearly and concisely, enticing users to click on an ad. I believe that these tasks are done best through human input as opposed to automated feeds.

Automation is useful if there are over a thousand product offerings and the products offered change dynamically within a twenty four hour period. Large ecommerce websites focusing on a wide range of products (such as Amazon and eBay) have such a large variety of products that it is almost impossible to make changes to their accounts manually. Therefore, XML feeds make perfect business sense in making account level, ad group level and ad level adjustments on a live campaign.

However, businesses that offer less than a thousand products and have a pricing strategy that is fairly fixed throughout the year will benefit more from manual intervention, as there would be greater control over changes made to ad copy and it would also be more customer focused. This alone would be a competitive advantage over advertisers who resort to automated paid search campaigns, as there’d most likely be disparity between the adverts and the users’ search query; this would lead to low levels of click through rates, which then lead to higher costs per click due to low quality scores.

For small to medium sized accounts, bulk changes could quite easily be done using Google Adwords Editor. Taking the extra time and effort into making sure every ad and every ad group is customised for the target user will pay more dividends through greater number of quality leads. This is an area that large ecommerce websites miss out on due to large amounts of automation, where the user’s keyword does not correspond with the ad copy and the related landing page. This would prove to be counterproductive, as leads generated would be of low quality. Furthermore, you could apply rules in order to automate bid management and use conversion optimiser wherever it is applicable. These can easily be implemented without the need for XML feeds.

Although introducing XML feeds would make account management relatively easier, I strongly believe that managing small to medium sized accounts manually will lead to better quality ads, better quality leads and will result in low overall spend – which will hopefully convert into higher return on investment.

Facebook Power Editor: Still a Work in Progress?

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Last week I was busy upgrading our Facebook advertising account from ‘personal’ to ‘business’, which turned out to be quite an arduous task. To be honest, there aren’t many differences in terms of features, but you do get access to a Facebook representative and you can also apply for credit, which is certainly a better deal than making daily payments through PayPal.

When I set about moving campaigns from my personal account to the business account, little did I realise how far behind Facebook’s Power Editor tool is when compared to the more familiar Adwords Editor. To start with, the Power Editor tool is not a downloadable application and therefore the speed of navigation and editing is quite poor, especially if you are moving large chunks of ad creative across accounts. Also, I found it quite discriminating that the Power Editor tool can only be accessed on the Google Chrome web browser. However, Facebook do promise that they will dole out a version that can be accessed using all the major web browsers very soon.

As advertisers, it is imperative that we familiarise ourselves with the Power Editor tool, as Facebook plan to phase out the Bulk Uploader tool by the end of this month. I must confess that the Facebook Power Editor tool is a massive improvement compared to its clunky predecessor, the Bulk Uploader tool. It’s extremely useful if you are creating campaigns from scratch as opposed to moving existing campaigns that are large in size to another account. However, some of the benefits of the Power Editor tool according to Facebook are:

Ability to create bulk ads
Mass-edit ads
Compatibility with Excel
Ability to see key stats and performance in order to optimise from within the tool itself
Backwards-compatibility with the Bulk Uploader

It’s still early days for the Power Editor tool and Facebook employ some of the world’s smartest people, so I’m confident that the tool will get better as time progress. For the time being though, I’d really like to hear some of your thoughts on the Power Editor tool if you have had any prior experience of using it.

Salespeople: the free SEO tool every agency has

Matthew Taylor — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 11:30:50 +0000

I have been working as a full time SEO Exec for just about a year now and a few things have become apparent in that time, most notably that SEOs love tools and are always on the lookout for that elusive competitive advantage to give them a ranking edge. So it strikes me as odd that every agency already has access to a free tool that will (amongst other things) get them high quality links, improve their keyword research, increase their PPC CTRs and conversion rates and keep their clients happy and informed. But they very rarely use it to its full potential.

So what is this free SEO tool? It’s your sales people. OK, so ‘free’ and ‘tool’ may have been used somewhat loosely, but bear with me.

How salespeople can help your SEO

The vast majority of SEOs are pretty awesome at what they do, and there are plenty of link building tactics where quite frankly it helps to be a computer geek, but one of the best ways to get great quality links is simply by asking, and this is where a lot of SEOs can come unstuck. I’m pretty sure you will see where I’m going with this already… but rather than sitting there trying to craft the perfect email, or spending hours talking on the phone uncomfortably, get your salesperson to do it and free up your time to do what you’re best at. I can pretty much guarantee that they will have a much better success rate and will do it a hell of a lot faster. And as an added bonus, they may just pick up a new client from it: after all, these sites need SEO too.

So once they are done with a few link requests, how about some keyword research? If you’ve exhausted all the obvious keywords and are prospecting for some longer tail gold, why not ask the people who sell all day to help you? Your salespeople will spend hours every day either consciously or unconsciously perfecting the language they use and studying the language clients use as well – put this to good use. This applies doubly if you have access to your clients’ sales teams. Get them to sell to you; listen to the language and terms they use, and ask them what terms the customers use. You never know they may provide a term that you’d never even think is related but that will send conversions through the roof for little or no SEO effort.

Tip – Most larger companies will have sales scripts that their team work from and will record calls for “training and quality purposes”, so why not ask if you can have a look/listen.

How salespeople can help your PPC
Q1. How often do you sit and look at your CTR and conversion rates and wish they could be higher? Most days?

Q2. How often have you asked the professional salesperson in the office for their input? Never?

This is the most obvious area where even a little sales experience can go a long way. Your salespeople will have spent their working life approaching people, having to summarise your services in a few words to spark someone’s interest enough to get them the opportunity to explain more. Is it me or does that not sound similar to what a PPC ad is trying to achieve? Use their experience and expertise and get them to write some of your PPC ad text, or at the very least get them to brainstorm some call to action phrases for you.

Tip – Every salesperson in the world at some point will have done an elevator pitch. Get them to do one for the client’s site and then chop it down to hit the character limit.

How salespeople can help your account management

I think it’s fair to say that if you work in SEO long enough, you will invariably come across a client you explain an SEO concept to and you know full well that they have no idea what you’ve just told them. The problem is that if a client doesn’t understand a concept, they are pretty unlikely to be fully supportive of it. The next time it happens, make a note of it, go and explain it how you would normally to one of your salespeople and then get them to explain it to you as if you were the client. Salespeople make a living from taking advanced concepts they probably won’t know the technicalities of and selling them to people who may never have heard of them.

Tip – If you’re having a real problem getting past your contact to speak to the member of the development team you really need to do some work for you, ask your salesperson to have a go – getting past “gatekeepers” should be second nature.

Not Using AdWords Remarketing? Don’t Delay! (Actually Do)

Richard Fergie — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:13:52 +0000

I recently read an AdWords Remarketing tips post which made me think of a few ways to improve your AdWords Remarketing campaigns by introducing a delay between when a person visits your site and when you start showing adverts to them.

Image from Stuck in Customs on Flickr

Buying Cycles
One problem with Remarketing is that it is hard to measure incremental value from it. A remarketing conversion tells you that someone who visited your site came back to your site and then bought something; the causal link between the advert and the purchase is not as clear as it is with search advertising.

Giving users time to complete their purchase naturally before you start showing them adverts avoids this problem whilst still taking advantage of the main feature of Remarketing; that people who have already been on your website are more valuable than people who haven’t.

For an ecommerce client we set up a 7 day delay on their remarketing to match the length of their buying cycle.

To setup a delay you need to create a remarketing tag as normal and then create another list using that tag but with a shorter duration. In this case they have 1 tag across their whole site with two remarketing audiences associated with it, one of them has a duration of 21 days and the other has a duration of 7 days. Then create a custom list containing everyone in the 21 day audience and no one from the 7 day audience. Bingo! Now you have to wait to see if it works.

Consumables
Another client sells a product which uses a consumable that they also sell. They reckon that people will need a refill after about 6 months. Using AdWords Remarketing, we are able to target people 6 months after they purchase with adverts for refills. Awesome!

Setting this up can be a bit more complicated.

If you want to target everyone who purchased but with a 6 month delay then you can use an existing Adwords conversion tracking code as a Remarketing tag. Then you can define your audiences as above.

If you need to target only people who purchased a particular product then you will need to insert a new remarketing tag into the conversion page only if the customer has bought the product. This might be easy or hard depending on your platform and web development team.

Seasonals
I manage several clients in the travel industry. I have setup a Remarketing audience for them that targets people who have converted 11 months down the line; just when they will be thinking about their next holiday!

Image from joiseyshowaa on Flickr

The maximum duration for a Remarketing audience membership is 540 days (nearly 18 months) so there is plenty of time to take into account all sorts of seasonal variation.

I hope this post has given you some Remarketing ideas. Leave a comment or find me on twitter if you have any other Remarketing tips.

2010 Predictions – How Well Did I Do?

Richard Fergie — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 12:54:02 +0000

Last year I made 10 predictions for PPC in 2010. I got a few of the more obvious things right, and few things wrong and I completely failed to predict some quite important changes. Here’s how I did:

1. CPCs will rise

This one was spot on (and also a complete no brainer).

2. More display advertising

More of our client’s at SEOptimise are using the display network now; some of them are even getting very good results from it so as far as my own PPC life goes this prediction is correct. I don’t know about the industry as a whole, does anyone have any figures about how the search/content share of spend has changed?

3. Conversion Attribution

“As part of their drive to push more business advertisers into display advertising Google will begin to move away from the last click attribution model that is the core of Google Analytics (and to a certain extent, AdWords).”

To a certain extent, the AdWords Search Funnels feature fits in with this prediction. It does not yet feature an actual attribution model but it does give you the data to have a shot at building one. I also predicted that we would still be talking about attribution modelling well into 2011; it is too early to say if I’m right on this one, but I think I probably am.

After seeing the Search Funnels data I no longer believe that conversion attribution is the answer to all my PPC problems; I think we will still be talking about it but I don’t think that much progress will be made in the near future (it is just not as important as I first thought).

4. Bing/Yahoo I

I predicted that Binghoo would increase their share of ad spend. For SEOptimise, this is true but for the industry as a whole I was completely wrong about this. As of Q3 2010 Google had increased their share of ad spend by 2% (according to Efficient Frontier’s search engine reports

5. Bing/Yahoo II

I thought that one of the ways Binghoo could improve their market share was by improving their interface and advertiser tools. Although I quite like their new keyword tool not much has changed in this area. The AdCenter interface is still pretty horrible and still doesn’t work in Chrome. I couldn’t have been more wrong about this one.

6. Other Platforms

“Other sites will introduce their own CPC auction platforms.” I didn’t mention Facebook in this prediction. If their CPC advertising feature was launched in 2010 then this prediction is a success but I think they already had it in 2009. I am unaware of any sites that have launched CPC adverts in 2010 so this prediction is wrong.

7. Real Time Search

What real time search?

8. Conversion Optimiser

“I expect Google to continue to work on their conversion optimiser tool”. Google launched “enhanced” CPC bidding during 2010. I consider this an improvement over their Conversion Optimiser tool although it is far from a “set it and forget it” solution (which is a good thing in my opinion).

9. Changes to the AdWords Advanced Exams

I haven’t noticed any big changes in the industry after the introduction of these exams. Fail.

10. Paid Search Will Dominate the SERPs

New background colour for adverts. Instant suggestion box pushing organic below the fold. New ad extensions giving AdWords even more real estate. Changing “Sponsored Listings” to “Ads”. A fairly obvious prediction to make (and one I’m happy to make again for next year) but definitely a successful one.

I give myself 4.5/10 for last years list. What do you think? What about your predictions from last year?

No related posts.

40 Google Instant SEO, SEM & Analytics Resources

Tad Chef — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:03:34 +0000

Image by Westside Shooter.

Google Instant is the talk of the town not only in the SEO industry. While some people still hope SEO will go away most experts agree that SEO is either just changing a bit or now more important than ever due to the recent changes. So I won’t list most of the usual “SEO is not dead” posts here as I expect you to know that. I’ll focus on what the instant search results will mean for SEO, SEM and analytics in reality.

Check out the following 40 Google Instant SEO, SEM & analytics resources list. Btw. The last item is probably the best one.

What is Google Instant all about

IMHO Google Instant is just Google Suggest on Speed. The first four suggestions from Google Suggest get shown in Google Instant now. As of now only registered and logged in users see it so its impact may be not yet that huge. Google wants to roll it out to all others though in future. Click the links below for more exact definitions and broader explanations.

What are the motivations behind Google Instant?

Speed is the official motivation behind the new search interface but some pundits including Kevin Gibbons of SEOptimise suspect monetization as the key idea behind Google Instant.

What are the issues with Google Instant?

Is Google Instant really better? Many people encountered problems like distraction, censorship, or downright irrelevant results. Find out more about them. The owners of Naked Pizza will have to rethink their branding strategy it seems because NSFW results don’t show up.

What are the ramifications of Google Instant for SEO, SEM, analytics etc.

Most people seem to agree that the long tail, that is often exotic search queries with 3 or more keywords will get used less by searchers. On the flip side people will probably at least in some cases follow the trail laid out by Google Instant and click search results from partial queries. Sadly Google Analytics won’t show partial queries you ranked for. Instead Google will always send the “predicted query” as part of the referrer.

Google Instant SEO Techniques

How do we adapt to the new search interface? How do we explain the changes to clients?
Do we have to optimize for partial queries now? Do you have to try to rank for flow when you sell flowers? Questions like these arise and get answered already by some SEO practicioners. Apparently others already practice black hat SEO for Google Instant, make sure to click the last item for these techniques.

What else? Last time Google has introduced a big change to its search result interface it hasn’t worked out due to unnecessary complexity. Do you remember the Google SearchWiki (NOT the SideWiki)? You could add, remove, move and comment on search results. I really liked it but most people got annoyed by the new options. This time I expect many people to get annoyed as well. Some of the articles linked above already mention that.

So Google Instant might disappear within a year like Google SearchWiki did. So don’t panic and change your SEO strategy altogether. Keep in mind that you should try to act independently and not follow every whim of Google. Keep calm and add more content, promote it and get links. You should be fine with that, mo matter the search interface.

My Thoughts On Google Instant

Richard Fergie — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 11:13:10 +0000

Everyone is talking about Google Instant; the new way for Google to display results.

Image from Zenera on Flickr

The basics are covered in many places:

I want to talk a bit less about the implementation and a bit more about the implications. It is too early to say anything for sure but here are my thoughts on how the new Google UI will alter the PPC landscape.

1. There will be more impressions
Impressions on Google Instant are counted differently to normal. Even thought Google are not recording impressions willy nilly (the user must interact with the page or wait 3 seconds) the total number of AdWords adverts served will increase. The interesting aspect is how these extra impressions will be distributed rather than if there will be extra impressions or not (they have to go somewhere).

2. The number of clicks will increase
This one is much more of a guess than point 1. I can’t see the number of AdWords clicks dropping so it will either stay the same or increase. I’m going to go with “increase” for two reasons:

I can’t imagine Google making a change that hits their bottom line
Organic results are pushed even further down the page.

3. CTR will blah, blah, blah
Who cares? Aside from quality score implications (discussed below) who gives a shit about CTR? Joking aside, I think this one will go both ways. On the one hand, there will be more impressions so CTR may go down. On the other hand the page interaction criteria for an impression to count introduces a sampling bias in what is counted as an impression.

4. Quality Score
Make up some quality score numbers and perform the quality score calculation as it is described by Google. Now reduce the score for you and the you-1 ranked ad by 10% and repeat the calculation. Your CPC has not changed! The point I am trying to make it that I believe it is your quality score relative to other advertisers that matters. If the new interface penalises everyone equally then there is nothing to worry about. Of course, any advertiser who can find away to avoid a drop in quality score when everyone else is failing … ;-)

5. Redefining the “Head”
A lot of people are talking about bidding on “stem” queries in order to capture searchers earlier in their query. For example an advertiser selling widgets may bid on “wikipedia” or “widnes” because these searches are triggered before the user has finished typing “widgets”. I don’t see this as being a massive game changer; it is no different to an advertiser selling black nike football boots bidding on “football boots”. The top of the head has been made bigger (the head now has a “hat”) but that is all. The game is still the same, but the pitch is larger.

6. The shorter, fatter tail
I expect to see the number of different queries drop as people are steered down well defined search paths. However, it is important to remember that the suggestions aren’t set in stone so that discarding a keyword because it doesn’t appear in the suggestion box may mean that opportunities are missed later on.

7. CPCs
CPCs may increase on head keywords that are stem phrases for valuable queries. Morrissons may start paying more for their brand terms in order to stay ahead of people trying to target people looking for mortgages. For keywords in the tail CPCs should fall; aggregating traffic from a larger number of search queries into one query will result in a small amount of inefficiancy that wasn’t there before; this should cause CPCs to fall (use the comments to correct me if I’m wrong). What I think will actually happen is that a larger number of advertisers bidding on a smaller number of keywords will cause CPCs to increase.

Top 10 tips & things you need to know about AdWords Remarketing

Rob Hillyard — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:39:29 +0000

This is a guest post from Rob Hillyard at Return on Digital.

Create a brand new campaign for Remarketing. This will enable you to monitor how everything is doing much easier than running it within an existing campaign.
You need at least 500 people in your target list before Google will start to show your ads. Depending on how much traffic your site gets and who you are targeting, it could take a couple of days before you see any traffic.
Image ads work best. Make sure you include all the possible image sizes to allow your ads to receive the largest amount of impressions possible.
Use a different message than your standard ads to bring the users back to your site. This is your second chance to convert the visitor into a customer. Special offers / discounts work well.

If you include an offer in your ad make sure you mirror this offer on your landing page.
Plan who you want to remarket to. You need to know your strategy before you start your implementation.
A Good place to start is to remarket to people who visited your site but didn’t convert.
Control how long people will see your remarketing ads for. Being constantly targeted by one advertiser can be annoying and you don’t want to put people off your brand.
Your ads may be displayed on sites that wouldn’t normally be seen as relevant. This is ok. Users are targeted based on previous interactions with your site rather than the content of the website.
Your ads will follow your users around sites within the Google Content Network. This can be quite annoying. Consider allowing users to opt out. http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/view

For the full guide on how to set up Remarketing, check out this post.

The Value of AdWords Brand Bidding

Richard Fergie — Tue, 25 May 2010 16:08:06 +0000

In my last post I talked about a method for testing the value of using AdWords on your brand.

The results are now in:

Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords when Running AdWords: £3471
Average Hourly Revenue from brand keywords without AdWords: £3278
Average Hourly Cost of brand keywords: £0.86

WIN!

Methodology

Traffic in this account varies quite a lot depending on the day of the week so I chose to segment by hour rather than day of the week. I wanted to keep the slices as fine as possible to reduce the variation caused by the time of day so I used the following day parting scheme:

I waited a month before analysing the data; for this account a month is plenty of time for the result to be statistically significant.

To get the information I needed I opened the Total Revenue part of the Ecommerce Report in Google Analytics.

After exporting the information to Excel I could easily find the averages that I needed. To make the test as fair as possible I only looked at the hours between 1600 and midnight. This may mean that my results are invalid during the rest of the day

PPC Ad Quality – Richard Fergie Presentation from SMX London

Kevin Gibbons — Mon, 17 May 2010 14:23:15 +0000

Richard Fergie has just presented at SMX Advanced London on PPC Ad Quality. Here is the presentation:
PPC Ad Quality – SMX London 2010 by Richard Fergie

For more coverage of the SMX London event, follow @kevgibbo.