This morning we officially announced the availability of a new call tracking feature in our Yield Web Marketing Suite for Advertisers and for Agencies through an integration with Marchex Call Analytics.  This is a feature many of our users have been eagerly awaiting so we’re pretty excited to announce that it’s live for all users.  For those who don’t know about Marchex, what this means is search marketers and their agencies can now track and optimize sales and conversions from search engine pay-per-click (PPC) ads or natural search results that lead to a telephone call as opposed to an online transaction.

For many of our users, a call to a telephone number is the conversion event inspired by their search engine ad or natural search result.  By integrating with Marchex, the leader in call analytics, search marketing professionals or their agencies managing campaigns in the Yield Web Marketing Suite are now able to effectively track and evaluate the efficacy of their search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns with a call conversion event.  Many of you have told us the reason your company or agency clients love PPC advertising is the ability to effectively track ROI on campaigns, but, of course, those who’ve relied on telephone calls as the conversion event have often been frustrated at the inability to attribute those calls to the advertising source.  The Yield Software–Marchex integration eliminates this ROI tracking gap in SEM.

One of our customers, Michael Cody at Directory Assistants, Inc., was a beta-tester of the new feature and here’s the feedback he gave me:

“As specialists in search and directional marketing for small and mid-size businesses, a disproportionate number of our clients rely on calls as their conversion event for PPC advertising.  Now we’re able to effectively manage PPC campaigns across Google, Yahoo! and Bing search engines on behalf of our clients while accurately attributing each conversion – no matter how those might occur – to the right campaign source.”

We’ve also included built-in reporting tools and analyses in the Yield Web Marketing Suite, so both our advertiser and agency customers now have greater visibility into the impact of your marketing initiatives, which means you can more effectively leverage SEM as a key component of your larger marketing mix.

For current subscribers to the Yield Web Marketing Suite, simply:

Login.

Click on either the Paid Search Optimizer tab.

In the Paid Search Optimizer module, click into an existing campaign or set up a new campaign.

Under “Quick Links” in the right-hand column, click on “Set Up Conversion Events”.

In the Conversion Events page, scroll down to the “Marchex Conversion Events” section and click on “Create a Marchex Conversion Event” link.

Follow the simple instructions; once your conversion event is set up, you’ll be able to track all your call conversion events in the Reports tab, along side all your other conversion event tracking data.

As always, our customer success reps are available to help you out if you questions or require assistance.  Let us know what you think of this new feature–we built it for you and hope you get great results from it.

We are excited to announce that we just launched our patent-pending Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine as part of both the Yield Web Marketing Suite and Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. This new feature is now available to all new and existing customers.

The Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine analyzes volumes of your historical traffic segmented by keyword, ad group and campaign. It then aggregates data based on common terms and uses sophisticated algorithms based on a variety of criteria including search volume, bounce rate and conversion rate to automatically recommend negative keywords for addition to each of your campaigns and ad groups.

While there are many facets of a search marketing campaign that are critical for success, many search engine marketers forget to pay enough attention to one of the most important aspects of their campaign. You launch your campaign by setting up keywords, groups and ad copy. However, you’ll inevitably discover that you want to spend your marketing budget even more effectively.

This is where “negative keywords” come into play. In short, negative keywords (also called “excluded keywords”) prevent your ads from showing when the search query includes one or more keywords that you have specified you want to exclude. For example, if you are a realtor and have a phrase match for “real estate agent”, you may attract searches looking for “real estate agent classes”. By adding “classes” as a negative keyword, you will ensure your ads are not shown for people looking for classes on becoming a real estate agent. By narrowing your focus of your advertisements, you will ensure that you wouldn’t be paying for clicks from people not interested in your offering. In addition, you will improve your quality score and, as a result, lower your cost per click by improving the relevancy of your ads.

You may ask, “Why wouldn’t I want to pay for any click I can get? After all, if the user wasn’t interested in what I was advertising, they wouldn’t click on it!” The answer is that people may click on your ad for a variety of reasons. They may not read your ad correctly, read it in the wrong context, or not even read it at all before clicking on it. Typically, they will realize they are in the wrong destination and immediately leave — which is called a bounce. In other words, you paid for the click and they weren’t remotely interested in what you were offering.

You can access negative keyword recommendations by navigating to your paid search campaign and clicking “Manage Negative Keywords” or clicking on any ad group to see the group detail. The pages displayed will show both your currently selected negative keywords and any negative keyword recommendations (note: we will only recommend negative keywords when you have enough traffic for us to make relevant recommendations).

By using the Yield Software Negative Keyword Recommendation Engine, you can be sure you are continuously tuning your campaign to eliminate targeting irrelevant traffic, improve the effectiveness of your search marketing budget and increase the ROI of your campaigns. (Who knew being so negative could produce such positive results?)

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 hold a series of meetings where you can have each team member present reports on their area of expertise as well as provide recommended changes or new ideas.

Pay special attention to those employees who interface directly with customers. Why? Because they’ll have real information that you can take to the bank, including challenges customers are facing, complaints about your company, and other anecdotal information that you just can’t get from PPC or web analytics data.

2. Reaffirm your company values and mission.

Companies naturally change and grow and when this happens, you can lose sight of your company’s values and reason for being. If you’ve never actually committed to paper you company’s values, have a brainstorming session with your team.

One trick that works is to list out all the values you and your team members can think of, then narrow this list down to 10 values – and then narrow this list down to the top three values that all of you agree on.

Write these values on a flip chart and hang the page on the wall so that you can refer back to them as you go through the next step.

3. Put everything on the table.

If you’ve read the new book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, by Ken Auletta, you know that Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s success is based in part on their asking why things have to be done a certain way.

You can ask “why,” too. When evaluating your business and marketing efforts for 2009, look at everything you do – from PPC and SEO to your e-newsletter and blog, and even your point-of-purchase signage (if you have a physical storefront) and how you answer the phone. Examine each tactic by itself and ask:

Does it match our values? Simply put, if you’re doing something that doesn’t fit with your company values, you have a disconnect — for example, if your value is “superior customer service,” yet it takes you 24 hours (or more!) to respond to client requests via email or the web. In this case you’ll need to determine how you’ll respond faster to customer requests in order to live up to your company’s value of “superior customer service.”

What’s working and what’s not? – Just because some expert said you should have a blog or an e-newsletter doesn’t mean you *should* have one if you can’t maintain it properly or if it’s not generating any return. If no one in your company has a passion for blogging, then ditch it. Ditto for anything else you’re doing.

What do our customers want? – Using the information supplied by team members, list out what customers have been asking for and what it would take to give it to them.  Are some of these “wants” realistic? Do they easily scale – meaning, you have some of the pieces and just need to add others. Or, is a “want” as simple as making the “order now” button on your Website bigger or sending them text messages when their favorite product is in stock or you’re having a sale?

What brings in 80% of our business? – Alan Weiss, a well-known business consultant, often advises that companies drop their “20% clients” – those that bring in only 20% of the business. You can use this same advice when evaluating your marketing efforts. Determine which tactics brought in 80% of your new business and then eliminate the low-producing campaigns, tactics, etc.

Not only will you feel better, but you’ll also open up room to implement new strategies.

Small plug: If you’re in the middle of planning for 2010 and you’ve been thinking adding PPC or SEO to your marketing mix but hesitate due to the cost or complexity, consider our Yield Web Marketing Suite.  You save time and money – and most importantly, you can easily determine what’s working and what’s not. You can see for yourself with our free 15-day trial.

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 that they wanted something a little more visual and easy-to-understand.

Because, of course, within the proper context, you can instantly see the answers you’re looking for.  Which is why we introduced our new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel.

Folks often wade through a sea of metrics and opt to pick an easily-visible one to fret over – most often cost-per-click (CPC). Of course you want the most traffic at the lowest cost… That’s just plain logic, right?

But what if none of those cheap visitors stay on your site to check out what you have to offer? What if most of them never come back for another visit or never convert to a paying customer?

You can be the world champion at CPC optimization and easily end up with a campaign that’s a total failure.

That’s where the age-old concept of the marketing and sales funnel comes in.  For those who don’t know what this is, the funnel is a visualization of the prospects you bring to the table and the degree to which they pass through each phase of the funnel (or not).  The funnel can be a great tool for quickly seeing if you’re losing customers along the way and, ultimately, just how successful your campaign has been.

For those who know funnels, you also know they’ve been abused or misused, but in the case of PPC campaign measurement, it works perfectly to provide visual context so you can see how all those metrics fit together.  And it provides a solid answer to the question “How’s my PPC campaign performing?”  With a good funnel, you can instantly see your campaign’s exposure, interest, relevance and results. And you can easily see where problems are occurring and then make the necessary adjustments.  And we think ours is a very, very good funnel!

What Are the Best PPC Optimization Techniques?

But now that you can see just how well your campaigns are performing and where you may be losing folks in the funnel, you’re probably wondering what  adjustments you can make to get to improvements in performance. This leads us to the second most popular area of questioning: What are the best tips for me to improve my PPC campaign?

Alas, yet again, our answer is often: “It depends.” (Sigh.)

And, yet again, there’s no shortage of techniques to optimize your PPC campaigns. (Double-Sigh.)

Many experts are eager to share their proven tricks for PPC campaign optimization, but just like the metrics, these techniques are meaningless without impact context.

Different optimization strategies impact different aspects of a campaign. So, beyond just understanding campaign performance, you also need to understand which optimization techniques are the best to improve your specific areas of lackluster performance.

For example, throwing more money, keywords or ads at a campaign that has a high bounce rate isn’t the best place to start. Rather, you’ll want to take a look at adding negative keywords to your campaign to stop irrelevant clicks, for example, or put some work into your landing pages, or create a campaign-specific landing page rather than sending users to your home page.

But there’s no need to play at guessing games.  The Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel also highlights a variety of optimization recommendations available to you at the specific points on the funnel where your campaign performance is less than stellar.  Click on the links directly below any particular funnel metric and you’ll see tips and strategies you can use to help improve the key metric in question.

The sales and marketing funnel is familiar to most marketing professionals but it may nevertheless be new to you.  Whichever category you fall in to, our new Yield Customer Acquisition Funnel will answer two of the most important questions you can ask:

1) How is your PPC campaign performing?

2) What you can do to further improve PPC performance?

Want a glimpse but not already a subscriber? Try our free for 15-day trial and see if you can take your campaign to the next level.

My co-worker, Jenae, recently sent me this email:

“I can’t tell you how many calls I have with folks who are hung up on cost per click (CPC). It’s the main metric they focus on when they start to dig into their campaigns and what they think they want to use Yield Software to optimize. It takes me a couple of discussions and lots of detailed examples to help them understand that while CPC is a tempting metric, having a low CPC doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful campaign — especially if you want conversions or are more ROI-driven.”

Search engine marketing comprises a number of tactics – online and offline – including pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, organic search, branding, and the various methods used to funnel traffic to your Website landing pages.

Too often, however, businesses of all sizes tackle only one aspect of an online marketing campaign without considering the costs of the entire campaign. And the one metric they often focus on, to the exclusion of everything else, is CPC.

Due to this narrow focus, we found that clients have a tough time answering this very basic question: “Is your PPC campaign making money or losing money?”

So, while driving down your CPC is good (and our Yield Web Marketing Suite is fully capable of delivering on this objective), focusing only on this metric may not help you achieve real return on investment (ROI) – nor will it show you how much it cost to achieve those clicks.

Which is why we counsel customers to focus on CPA – or cost per acquisition.

You’ll find lots of definitions for CPA, but in a nutshell, CPA is the amount you pay in total to acquire a customer or online order.

Notice, I did not say the amount you pay per click, but the amount you paid in total to acquire a customer or online order. This total dollar amount should include all of your marketing-related costs for a particular campaign including: branding and advertising, SEO, inbound customer support, and PR, to name a few things.

Only by looking at CPA can you determine if your cost is too high (compared to industry or internal benchmarks).

Let’s say you’re a shoe manufacturer that sells shoes in bricks-and-mortar stores and online. To build brand awareness, you must advertise — whether online, in print, or on TV. You may build mechanisms for capturing Website visitor information (i.e. via newsletters, contests, PPC ads). And you’ll likely need analytics that let you slice and dice data to determine who your target customer is, how she found you online, which products she’s ordered in the past, and when she likes to be contacted (to name a few things).

You may also develop email campaigns promoting your shoes, hire an agency to oversee these campaigns (if you don’t do it in-house), develop landing pages, etc. etc. etc.

By now it should be very clear to you that solely focusing on reducing CPC is not the best tactic. This is because you could be getting a ton of untargeted traffic that doesn’t covert – and reducing CPC won’t don’t anything to increase campaign ROI.

Put another way, which would you prefer:

100 clicks at $0.10 per click, resulting in 1 conversion, at a $10.00 cost per conversion; or

10 clicks at $1.00 per click, resulting in 5 conversions at a $5.00 cost per conversion?

(I know which outcome I’d pick!)

The key, then, is understanding how many clicks – and what kind of clicks – you need in order to convert one sale. Then you can understand what the cost is of getting those clicks. But as I’ve pointed out, you must consider a whole host of other variables before deciding that CPC is too high.

The reason so many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) become befuddled with regard to campaign ROI is precisely because of the sheer number of PPC variables. Once you begin focusing on CPA, you may go through a period of trial-and-error in order to arrive at the exact right results.

Sadly, time (and its corollary, sustained investment) is not something most SMBs have on their side… which is why we suggest you start in a more limited way: focus on optimizing three elements of your marketing strategy in tandem – paid search, natural search, and your landing pages – and focus on driving down your overall cost to acquire and convert one visitor.

By optimizing natural search you can improve your page rank in the leading search engines, thereby driving more free traffic to your site. Similarly, by optimizing your paid search campaigns by focusing on your best-performing keywords (in terms of generating conversions), you can drive more of the right kind of traffic from paid sources. When combining the cost of acquiring your paid search visitors with those visitors you acquired through natural search, you effectively lower the cost of acquisition overall.

And because you’re also looking at optimizing your site’s principle landing pages, you increase the likelihood that those visitors will convert.

Small plug: Doing this all on your own, with disparate systems or consulting specialists, can be time-consuming and costly. Which is why we designed our Yield Web Marketing Suite to simultaneously optimize paid search, natural search and landing pages in one fully automated solution. Using our system can help you grow your business and keep it sensibly focused on driving down CPA.

For instance, instead of spending months in trial-and-error approaches, our Yield Web Marketing Suite tests multiple variables across your PPC campaigns and favors the best converting variables in real time. To learn more, sign up for our free, no obligation 30-day trial and see for yourself how you can reduce your CPA efficiently and quickly.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored Links” you see on search result pages on Google, Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search, marketers are able to track: (a) clicks on an ad link; (b) arrival at a website’s landing page; (c) what visitors do once on the site; and (d) whether or not that visitor converts to a paying customer, among many other possibilities.

Such tracking is typically achieved by using a third-party analytics package in your website.  Such packages range from free and easy-to-install (i.e., Google Analytics) to quite complex and powerful systems that are very expensive and time-consuming to implement.  If you’re a small or growing business, Google Analytics is a great tracking package that will give you much of what you need and is very easy to implement simply by following their detailed instructions.

Once a visitor converts to a paying customer, web marketers are able to do an ROI analysis on that particular individual and across all customers who similarly converted to paying customers from the same campaign.  By comparing the total amount spent to acquire customers through a web marketing campaign to the amount of revenue generated by those who clicked on links and converted to paying customers, a campaign ROI can be quickly calculated.

Obviously, most web marketers want to make at least one more dollar than it cost to execute the campaign.  And, there are some instances where web marketers will make well-calculated decisions to arrive at a negative ROI in order to achieve their campaign objectives (for instance, you might decide that acquiring a large volume of new traffic within a tight timeframe, even if there is a negative ROI, is the right long-term strategy for your site).  But ideally, campaigns will perform much better than either of these scenarios and the degree to which a campaign’s ROI is impressive or not will have much to do with a number of factors.  These include:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management.  Achieving excellent placement in the Sponsored Links sections of search results pages is a holy grail of search marketers.  There are a number of factors that ensure a PPC campaign is well managed and optimized for the best outcomes.  These include keyword lists, bid management, geo-targeting choices, product pricing and promotion decisions, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  While it is important to actively and accurately manage paid search campaigns, it is equally as important to ensure websites rank high in natural (or organic) search results.  Clicks on these links are free to the advertiser and can effectively lower the overall cost of a web marketing campaign when averaged with paid customer acquisition.  By effectively optimizing a website for search engines, web marketers can ensure the same paid links appear high up in natural (and therefore free) search results.

Landing Page Optimization (LPO).  Clicks from both paid and natural search results must resolve to a web page that is optimized for converting first-time or returning visitors into paying customers, which is why LPO is of such great importance to search marketing.  And, LPO is also concerned with keeping the sales cycle as short as possible.  There are both simple and sophisticated ways to manage how such pages are optimized—either dynamically or in limited tests.  Landing pages can be the homepage of a website, but more experienced web marketers will typically create a specialized landing page that ties directly to the links that generated the clicks in the first place.

Anyone interested in embarking on a web marketing campaign should do so with a measurement plan in mind.  Being able to justify the time and expense of such efforts is critical in understanding the best ways in which to attract and profitably retain customers.

So time for a Small Plug: our Yield Web Marketing Suite is a fully automated and fully integrated set of powerful modules to enable you to easily set up and manage your web marketing efforts.  And to effectively measure the ROI on your efforts.  It’s ideal for small businesses and those with limited marketing resources.  Even more sophisticated web marketers use Yield Software to make the management and tracking of campaigns fast, easy and profitable.

For more information about our Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.

Unlike outdoor advertising (i.e. billboards) or radio and television ads, where precise correlations to ROI can be elusive, search engine marketing (SEM) enables marketers to track interactions and behavior at every step of engagement.

Though a huge number of web marketing professionals employ display advertising on sites like NYTimes.com or FOXNews.com or Yahoo!, a growing share of marketing dollars are being directed to the search engines and specifically pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.  By buying the “Sponsored Links” you see on search result pages on Google, Yahoo Search or Microsoft Live Search, marketers are able to track: (a) clicks on an ad link; (b) arrival at a website’s landing page; (c) what visitors do once on the site; and (d) whether or not that visitor converts to a paying customer.

Once a visitor converts to a paying customer, web marketers are able to do an ROI analysis on that particular individual and across all customers who similarly converted to paying customers from the same campaign.  By comparing the total amount spent to acquire customers through a web marketing campaign to the amount of revenue generated by those who clicked on links and converted to paying customers, a campaign ROI can be quickly calculated.

Obviously, most web marketers want to make at least one more dollar than it cost to execute the campaign.  And, there are some instances where web marketers will make well-calculated decisions to arrive at a negative ROI in order to achieve their campaign objectives (for instance, you might decide that acquiring a large volume of new traffic within a tight timeframe, even if there is a negative ROI, is the right long-term strategy for your site).  But ideally, campaigns will perform much better than either of these scenarios and the degree to which a campaign’s ROI is impressive or not will have much to do with a number of factors.  These include:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign Management.  Achieving excellent placement in the Sponsored Links sections of search results pages is a holy grail of search marketers.  There are a number of factors that ensure a PPC campaign is well managed and optimized for the best outcomes.  These include keyword lists, bid management, geo-targeting choices, product pricing and promotion decisions, etc.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  While it is important to actively and accurately manage paid search campaigns, it is equally as important to ensure websites rank high in natural (or organic) search results.  Clicks on these links are free to the advertiser and can effectively lower the overall cost of a web marketing campaign when averaged with paid customer acquisition.  By effectively optimizing a website for search engines, web marketers can ensure the same paid links appear high up in natural (and therefore free) search results.

Landing Page Optimization (LPO).  Clicks from both paid and natural search results must resolve to a web page that is optimized for converting first-time or returning visitors into paying customers.  And, LPO is also concerned with keeping the sales cycle as short as possible.  There are both simple and sophisticated ways to manage how such pages are optimized—either dynamically or in limited tests.  Landing pages can be the homepage of a website, but more experienced web marketers will typically create a specialized landing page that ties directly to the links that generated the clicks in the first place.

Anyone interested in embarking on a web marketing campaign should do so with a measurement plan in mind.  Being able to justify the time and expense of such efforts is critical in understanding the best ways in which to attract and profitably retain customers.  So time for a Small Plug: our Yield Web Marketing Suite is a fully automated and fully integrated set of powerful modules to enable you to easily set up and manage your web marketing efforts.  And to effectively measure the ROI on your efforts.  It’s ideal for small businesses and those with limited marketing resources.  Even more sophisticated web marketers use Yield Software to make the management and tracking of campaigns fast, easy and profitable.

For more information about our Yield Web Marketing Suite, go here.

To see more blog posts in our Introduction to Web Marketing Series, go here.