Ethics in the Search Marketing World

…and How to Keep Your Nose Clean

The search marketing world creates interesting situations where ethical lines can get stretched quite a bit. For instance, in the search marketing world information is public. Yet unscrupulous actions can be taken anonymously — a scenario too tempting for many a desperate competitor. We run into many clients who have been unethically pursued by a competitor. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive policing capabilities out there, and complaints about suspected competition fraud are frequently ignored.  Still there are things you can do to protect yourself and you should never stoop to the level of an unethical competitor to retaliate — in the long run, there are always consequences for unethical behavior.

First, let’s look at some all-too-common non-ethical examples. These just don’t pass the red-face test:

Competitors clicking on your pay-per-click ads.

First,…

When Your Conversion Rate Plummets

Twelve Diagnostic Questions to Get Answers

We frequently get inquiries from businesses that were getting a healthy amount of leads and conversions, but then suddenly their conversion rate takes a nose dive. When the phone stops ringing in today’s economy, panic ensues.

Many businesses aren’t even aware of all the different factors which can cause a negative change like this to occur. In order to give you a hand, we put together this list of questions to ask yourself to get to the root of the problem.

We’ll start at the “front” of the line with our problem-solving and work our way back to the landing page and website, since front-line changes are much easier to address.

1. Have the paid search keywords that are getting clicks changed?

Check out your pay per click (PPC) advertising keywords bringing in traffic.…

Aardvark, an Awesome Wave and a Good Buzz

Google’s Social Revolution

Last week’s announcement of Google’s (relatively small) acquisition of Aardvark, the real-time social Q&A start-up, received a fair amount of buzz.  Which was on top of the abundant buzz generated by Google’s release of Google Buzz.  Which, of course, follows last year’s buzz about Google Wave.

Though Wave, a social collaboration tool, is kind of uber-geeky and not particularly intuitive, Google Buzz draws on a now well-known metaphor: the news feed.  And while it has generated some early heat around privacy issues, Google Buzz (in its most current form – they’ve been updating it nearly daily in response to user reactions) draws on your Gmail and chat contacts to form an instant social graph.  That graph enables you to stay connected with your contacts in much the same way you would via Facebook or Twitter (or, more accurately, FriendFeed before…

Achieve Your 2010 Web Marketing Goals

First and Foremost: Have a Written Plan!

Now that you’ve solicited ideas from your co-workers and you’ve evaluated your 2009 marketing efforts, it’s time to roll this data into a Web marketing plan for 2010.  Follow this basic plan for setting up a credible plan before moving into the new year.

Establish Objectives

To be effective, your Web marketing plan should tie into measurable, realistic and time-based business objectives. For instance, let’s say you want to increase the number of readers to your blog because you’ve noticed that once people find your blog, they stick around and perform other actions on your website.

Instead of using the vague phrase “Increase number of visitors to the blog,” state your objective this way: “Increase the number of visitors to the blog who download our e-book by 10% for Q1.” You can…

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Marketing (Part II)

Looking at Reach and Engagement

In my last post, I talked about how to get your team involved in evaluating your 2009 marketing efforts. In part two of this series of preparing your marketing plans for 2010, I cover how to evaluate “reach” and “engagement.”

“Reach” is the new word for “awareness.” Others call it your “sphere of influence” or “thought leadership.” Basically, you want to measure the tactics you used to make people aware of your company / products / services – and these tactics aren’t limited to social media.  Why?  Because social media, your Website, and offline tactics such as speaking gigs or print ads often influence each other. Some things to consider when measuring “reach” include:

Social media – The number of followers you have on Twitter, fans on Facebook, or connections on LinkedIn.

Website – The increase…

Evaluating Your 2009 Marketing Efforts

Now that 2009 is coming to a close in just a few short weeks, it’s time to develop marketing plans and budgets for the coming year. Before making any plans however, it pays to assess your 2009 marketing efforts – what worked, what didn’t, and what did you want to implement but never had the time or resources to do so.

We here at Yield Software are going through the same process – and it definitely takes more than one staff meeting or a “back of the napkin” approach! Here are some of the strategies we’ve used to help us make plans for 2010 and beyond:

1. Get your entire team involved

Small companies have one advantage big companies don’t have – the ability to hold company-wide meetings and solicit people’s feedback and insights. It’s best if you…

Funnel Vision

What Are the Most Important PPC Metrics?

Our current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite will see a new feature when they log on today: the new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.  This groovy new feature is a very visual way to instantly see how each of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are doing.

We frequently get two key questions from folks regarding their PPC campaigns:

How can I tell if my campaign is doing well?

What are the metrics I should be paying attention to?

Depending on the campaign, the response is often not a simple one. And accurately concluding how your campaign is doing pivots off of what sort of results you want from your campaign.  Our system provides a variety of both simple and more complex reports to gain insight to these questions, but we heard from our customers…

Is Pay Per Click Right For You?

Addressing Common Concerns

At Yield Software, we have the luxury of seeing a multitude of businesses across a wide range of industries, geographies, business models, etc. This give us a unique perspective on internet marketing effectiveness for different types of businesses. A question I hear often is: “For my type of business, is search engine marketing relevant?” While it’s not safe to over-generalize, I’ve put some thoughts together that can help you decide how relevant pay-per-click is for your business.

The benefits are well known and documented–search marketing has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry because it is effective and measurable. Combining the fact that a disproportionate share of marketing budgets are targeted to the Internet relative to the amount of time users spend on the it, together with the ability to assess exactly how valuable each…

Which Is Harder? Google Analytics or Rubik’s Cube?

Understanding the Cost of “Free”

Let’s face it: It is great that Google offers a free analytics tool that tracks all your traffic and allows you to slice-it and dice-it by a variety of different dimensions. You can have a tremendous amount of insight into how your website is performing, where your traffic is coming from, which content is most effective, what users are doing when they get to your site and more.

However, on the downside, in the “Information Rights and Publicity” section of Google’s Terms of Service, they have the right to use the data internally as they see fit. (Insert “crickets chirping in the woods” soundtrack.)  On top of that, you need to be able to really understand all the data you’re presented with, and have the time to analyze and understand it properly.

So,…

For Ad Agencies, a Call to Act as Consigliere

…or Risk Getting Whacked by Your Clients

In an August post written for the Small Agency Diary blog, Tom Martin talks about how ad agencies have neglected to act in their clients’ best interests. Writes Martin:

We’ve slacked off. We don’t invest nearly enough in our people and resources to ensure we are actually ahead of our clients and in a position to look around the corner and see what’s coming. We have a serious talent gap in our senior-management ranks, and we’ve (by and large) forfeited sound strategy in favor of cheap production tricks and cute one-liners that will line our shelves with awards but not necessarily our clients’ shelves with dollar bills.

To address these issues, writes Martin, agencies can take a cue from The Mob, specifically the Consigliere. For those of you not hip to Mafia…