Thursday, May 30, 2002

Colleague Jim Courtney reports:

I attended a launch event for a supplier of emergency hardware services... they get 50% of their revenues via web marketing and, in particular, keywords on Overture and Google. The rest comes from being known at the tech support level in media hardware organizations.

Pay Per Click is the killer marketing app of 2002!

Riggs

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

MarketingSherpaWeekly's May 22 issue tells this story:

Early last Tuesday morning Neil Budde, Publisher of The Wall Street Journal Online stepped up to a podium to give what he thought would be a fairly standard speech.... Out of the blue, a member of the audience interrupted Budde with a quick question... And for the rest of the day, the audience grilled him and his nine fellow speakers -- all Internet subscription site publishers and marketers -- relentlessly.

The full report is outstanding. Here's just one excerpt:

...How do you get potential subscribers to get so excited that they pay despite their own laziness, despite the million other things going on in their lives, and despite the free and paid competition?

There appear to be two routes to content success (beyond relentless quality, quality, quality, quality.) These are:

a. Unique content that only works online -- for example RealNetworks NASCAR channel allows you to choose to listen to your favorite driver's audio feed during the race. This is impossible in traditional broadcast where you have no choice about which voice you'll hear during the race.

b. Content with a strong voice and personality -- Smith said, "People are dying for leadership." Formal news reporting and balanced, professional features journalism may work well in other mediums, but in online what counts is a unique personality that both feels "expert" but also that people respond to on a visceral level. (Well, gee that makes your editorial hiring easier huh?)

Read the whole report.

Riggs

Wednesday, May 29, 2002

In an informative article in its July print issue on what really goes on with search engines, PCWorld.com reports: "at the time of this writing, AOL announced it would not renew its contract with Overture. It will start to display ads purchased through Google this summer."
The review gives Google top marks for quality and editorial integrity. It likes few metasearch engines - with the exception of Ixquick. It criticizes MSN and AOL for confusing and biased search results:

When you run a search for "travel" on AOL, four of the first ten results that AOL delivers are affiliated with AOL--the number one recommended site is AOL Travel. AOL ranks Expedia, Microsoft's travel site, at number 14. Plug the same keyword into MSN's search field and you'll find no mention of any AOL travel sites within the first 50 results. But Expedia appears in the top spot in two categories, Featured Sites and Sponsored Sites (go to PC World's Analysis for more details). Expedia is the second-most-visited travel site on the Web, and AOL Travel is number seven, according to recent statistics from the research firm Jupiter Media Metrix.

Scroll down to "Search Gems: Sites for Special Searches"; this section offers 21 specialized search sites - for example, MagPortal, which lets you "search through a huge archive for specific magazine articles, or browse topics like "small business" or "recruiting." "

Thanks to Verrecchia Group's Mitch Joel for passing this to me.

Riggs

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Great article from Ford Kanzler at Marketing Profs called "The Positioning Statement: Why To Have One Before You Start Communicating". Here's a critical excerpt:

A well-crafted positioning statement defines your company's direction. It answers seven essential questions:

who you are

what business you're in

for whom (what people do you serve)

what's needed by the market you serve

against whom do you compete

what's different about your business

what unique benefit is derived from your product or services?

Thanks Ford!

Riggs

Tuesday, May 21, 2002

It may not go anywhere, but this is an interesting website-to-website click exchange model. Check out ClicksBroker's site.

From their May 21 press release, passed to me by Mitch Joel at Verrecchia Group:

...At ClicksBroker, buyers or sellers of clicks (visitor traffic) can meet and buy or sell directly from each other after they test their compatibility. The biggest obstacle in creating a marketplace for clicks before was that the quality of visitor traffic and links click-through ratio (compatibility parameters) could not be predicted in advance.

ClicksBroker solves the problem of compatibility by enabling websites to test the quality of their interaction before deciding to buy or sell from each other. Once a user registers, ClicksBroker will suggest the best matches for his website and then perform trial processes with these buyers or sellers (automatically changing link messages). After the trials, where the parameters of relationship (compatibility) are recorded, there is a bidding process where clicks (visitor traffic) will be bought or sold for the market price.

Riggs

Friday, May 17, 2002

In his current issue, Dr, Ralph Wilson updates his "5-cent" strategy. He warns of new policies on Overture and discusses positive changes on Google AdWords Select.

Riggs

Saturday, May 11, 2002

Scott Anderson adds:

Brent Winters is president of MarketPosition, the makers of WebPosition Gold (the #1 selling SEO tool). He's a major player. In this newsletter (worth subscribing to) he touts ClickPatrol as the best PPC bid management tool & is offering a 10% discount. I haven't used CP yet (having paid good money for another product that I've yet to unwrap). The critical factor: is it Overture-approved. CP says they are.

For what it's worth..

Scott

Actually Scott, this is worth a lot. A 10% discount adds up on a monthly subscription program...

Riggs

Friday, May 10, 2002

More from Scott Anderson:

Had an incredibly interesting meeting yesterday with one of the leading makers of marketing automation software (MarketFirst). This stuff is amazing. I can't believe how many calories & dollars are wasted conducting marketing any other way. The new generation of marketers better focus 200% on strategic fundamentals (& human nature!) because a lot of functional specialties will be increasingly superfluous.

Scott

(Riggs)

Wednesday, May 08, 2002

Scott Anderson at Shadow Marketing came back with this comment about my praises for Dr. Ralph Wilson in his Pay Per Click (PPC) article:

Agreed. We make extensive use of Overture to drive trial downloads at Company X (which makes software for collaborative meeting scheduling). We buy 13 phrases that revolve around four primary themes. I used WordTracker to discover what seems to be a universal truth -- the phrases used by companies to describe themselves are seldom (if ever) the ones used by prospects searching the web. WordTracker is fabulous in some ways but their arithmetic is fundamentally flawed (though the SEO [Search Engine Optimization - Ed.]community seems oddly silent on that). So I amend their findings with Overture's own keyword research tool plus some analysis of my own devise to more properly score the qualified lead traffic potential for each phrase. It's tedious but very eye-opening.

The money themes for Company X turned out to be a mix of the sort-of-obvious and not-so-obvious: calendar software, scheduling software, time management and palm software (Company X syncs with palms; a minor feature but hugely searched upon).

In the first 2 months of the campaign they got 7155 visitors at an average cost of $1.13 per visitor. Trial download conversions vary quite a bit by phrase (from 1.9% to 7.1%), but it averages out to 3.5%. So their cost per download is under $33. These leads are still in the pipeline, being nurtured by inside sales. If they close 10%, the cost per sale is only $330 and their average initial order value is over $2500. They haven't yet determined lifetime value.

So Overture works great...MUCH better than Google's AdWords Select PPC program (by 2 orders of magnitude!). We'll soon be expanding into Europe with Overture UK and eSpotting, Britain's pan-European answer to Overture. We also analyzed performance by ad position. Obviously being in the top 3 is crucial since those results are syndicated all over hell and gone. But we found that the #1 spot is more than twice as effective as #2, which is more than twice as effective as #3. That spread surprised me. So we bid for the #1 spot constantly, even if it means we exhaust our monthly budget cap.

Has marketing gotten interesting or what?

Scott

(Riggs)

Tuesday, May 07, 2002

Scott Anderson of Shadow Marketing wrote a great piece on Search Engine Optimization, just below.

To this, I thought I'd add what Dr. Ralph Wilson has to say, in an article on Pay Per Click (PPC) strategies:

Don't discount the value of search engine positioning for the most "expensive" and competitive search terms. If you use WebPosition Gold software diligently, you can achieve high rankings in the regular search engines. I've done it. But maintaining your position requires careful long-term monitoring. Since effective search engine positioning is so time-intensive, I recommend that businesses -- even small businesses -- outsource this task to firms that specialize in this arcane art and science.

Search engine positioning will bring you lots of traffic, but it may not be too targeted (since you can't control the text of the "ad") and it can take months to build. PPC strategies, on the other hand, can bring lots of traffic almost immediately, and, if you've done your homework, for a reasonable cost per click. Use both approaches.

And I just LOVE Dr. Wilson's 5-cent Overture strategy! Check it out in this article.

Riggs

Friday, May 03, 2002

Effie-award winner Scott Anderson of Shadow Marketing has become a real Search Engine Optimization hawk. Here, he briefs Jay Bower of CrossBow Group, who wanted to know about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firms. (I had also mentioned Good Key Words as a software solution.)

I haven't yet tried goodkeywords (downloading now), but if Danny Sullivan (mega SEO guru) gives it a nod, then I'm sure it's quite helpful.

But there are key points to keep in mind with regard to SEO:

Ranking highly (in the top 10 search results) for carefully chosen search phrases is by far the least expensive way to attract pretty well qualified traffic to a site. But it's a long-term, multi-faceted and reasonably time-consuming endeavor, but well worth it.

Properly done, key phrase research determines not only the popularity of a phrase among searchers, but also the popularity of that phrase among websites trying to attract the searchers. It's the ratio of those numbers that really indicates the likelihood of getting into the top 10 results. But that's just the beginning.

You then need to apply that learning to the content hierarchy of your site (a practice called 'building theme pyramids' in the SEO biz). The headlines, copy and graphical elements need to be constructed with an understanding of how to appeal to both human visitors and search engine robots. Bearing in mind that the constructs that appeal most to search engine A will likely hurt your relevancy ranking in search engine B (more choices to make). By the way, the keyword metatag has now become superfluous...the spiders don't even look at it anymore.

Then, of course, you have search engines constantly revamping their indexing and relevancy scoring technology. So it's not a one-time shot, but an on-going monitoring and enhancement effort. Frankly, it's a pain in the ass!

A good SEO consultant likes that sort of thing, though (a concept I believe we should let pass without comment, Riggs). But it's critical to link up with one that does NOT spam the spiders. Yes, "spamdexing" has become the bane of the industry. SEO guys who use the silly hack tricks that worked in 1999 will get your site blacklisted. MOST of the software solutions have automated spamdexing. NEVER use a product that automatically resubmits your pages. NEVER use a service that guarantees results.

Doing it right requires someone who loves the minutia AND rabidly subscribes to all the professional SEO newsletters. So expect to pay a few grand for a proper job. The key upfront is to know how much each visitor is worth so you can determine a breakeven on the SEO investment.

Whew. Sorry for the spew, but once you scratch the surface of this topic it gets hairy fast.

Scott

Thanks Scott!

Riggs

Wednesday, May 01, 2002

After the boom and the crash, here's a landmark event: according to a recent study, people are now spending less time on the Web looking for pornography and more time searching for business information!

Information Week, April 2, 2002 (excerpted):

In 1997, entertainment or recreation queries dominated the engine, accounting for 19.9% of all searches. By 2001, those queries had fallen to seventh place, at 6.6%. The second most common type of search in 1997 was sex and pornography, at 16.8% of all searches; in 2001, that category had sunk to fifth place at only 8.5% of all queries--many of which were related to human sexuality rather than pornography.

Meanwhile, more business-oriented terms climbed the ranks. Commerce, travel, employment, or economy queries only amounted to 13.3% of the pool in 1997, making it the third most common type of search, but surged to first place by 2001, representing 24.7% of all queries.

Thanks to Liam Leahy for forwarding this. He suggests this additional reading:

The Self-Organizing Web
Yahoo's Not Just For Consumers Anymore

Riggs