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,…

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…

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…

We’re Big Fans of Agencies…

…Which is Why We’re in New York

Even though we are headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley, we are making our first trip east to exhibit at ad:tech New York 2009, with very good reason. The nightlife? The food? The fashion? While New York certainly has a lot to offer–the three months I lived there, I think I slept for about 2 hours total–it is also one of the epicenters of advertising activity. Sure, Madison Avenue is renowned. However, in this digital media age, there are tons of interactive agencies successfully helping advertisers get online and leverage search engine marketing to attract and acquire customers.

So, what could be a better location to launch our agency offering, the Yield Web Marketing Suite for Agencies. We’ve been working on this product for over a year, ensuring that…

For Agencies, Add Value to Client SEM

Break Down SEM Silos

Search engine marketing (SEM) agencies typically fall into two camps: specializing in search engine optimization (SEO) to the exclusion of all else or focusing exclusively on pay-per-click (PPC) while shunning SEO altogether.

Hence, entrenched SEM silos have become the norm and businesses end up working a the traditional ad agency for “outbound” marketing activities (print and radio/TV advertising, direct mail), an SEO agency, and/or a PPC agency.

The problem with this scenario is three-fold:

First, companies end up overlapping their efforts.

Second, little integration exists between traditional marketing and SEM (and online versus offline).

Third, the ability to see a comprehensive view of the marketing “big picture” is often severely compromised.

The SEM silo within companies occurred naturally, according to search marketing specialist Marta Turek. In an objective and insightful essay, “Breaking the Search Marketing Silo,” on her…

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,…

Web Marketing Holiday Prep, Part 2

Spruce-up Your Virtual Storefront for the Holiday Season

Rather than spend money in these tough times, consumers are saving it (savings accounts are the new black). Instead of resigning yourself to a red holiday season (in the bottom line sense of the word), now is the time to gear up and make the most of the holiday season.

And you can – with a few well-thought out strategies that I outline in this, Part II of Web Marketing Holiday prep. (If you missed Part I, wherein I talk about aligning online and offline strategies, you can find it here.)  This week: getting your online house in order!

First: Ensure your site is extra secure for online transactions.

I visited the website of a financial institution recently and was appalled to note that the little “lock” icon was missing from…

New eBook on Link Economy Debuts

Comprehensive Strategies for Growth

All of us here at Yield Software have worked hard to provide useful, easy-to-understand information on the full range of Web marketing possibilities on this blog, through our tweets on Twitter and the like. And, based on feedback, it seems the many small and growing businesses we serve (and tons more we don’t) really appreciate the information.

Which is why we were inspired to pull together our first eBook, “The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses,” a limited-edition print run of which will be distributed from our booth at the annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2009 Conference & Expo August 11 and 12, 2009 at the San Jose Convention Center.

Addressing the concerns of business leaders who have limited or no experience with Web marketing, our new eBook provides an…

Understanding the Link Economy

…and Why it Matters to You

It can be tough to be a small business these days. Once upon a time, one need only find a tidy shop on a busy street, hang out a shingle, and set about serving the people in your neighborhood.

Then came the internet. And Google. And terms like search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.  And that shingle? Forget simply hanging the little guy over your door: you now have to do things like “link out”; attract “inbound links”– especially the really juicy kind; and get crawled by search engines. (All of which sounds like a plot to a really odd horror movie.)

In other words, businesses today must be online and are governed, in part, by the concept known as the Link Economy – a term popularized by Jeff Jarvis,…