The enhancements include:

Content Network Support – Create and launch campaigns on the Google and Bing content networks so your text ads can appear on third-party websites

Display Network Support – Create and launch campaigns that leveraging graphical (also known as “display” or “banner”) advertising on the Google Display Network

Mobile Network Support – Target mobile users by creating and launching mobile advertising campaigns on the Google Mobile and Bing Mobile Networks



Multiple Ad Creation Wizard – Easily create multiple versions of your search, content, display and/or mobile advertising with real-time ad validation

Ad Cloning – Easily create copies of your existing ads and even versions of those ads targeted for different publishers and network types (e.g. display, mobile, etc.)

Improved Bid Optimization – We have continued to make significant advances in our bid optimization technology to deliver even better results for your online advertising campaigns.

Improved SEO Inbound Link Analysis – Our link analyzer has been enhanced to more accurately track inbound links and benchmark your link building performance comparatively against other websites

Scheduling Standard Reports – You can now schedule the Natural Search Report, Paid Search Report and Landing Page Optimization reports to be automatically run and emailed to you on a weekly or monthly basis.

Improved Power Editing – We have exposed more statistics for you to view and now all the statistics can be searched and sorted

Real-Time Task Monitoring – You can now view and track the status of campaign imports and custom report processes as well as receive real-time notifications when these tasks complete

We hope you enjoy them and as always, if you have any questions, feedback or issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@yieldsoftware.com.

We’ve been busy at Yield Software — this is the second big announcement in as many weeks, and there’s more to come — and today’s announcement is going to make a lot of businesses happy. Today we released the newest version of our flagship offering, which we’re calling Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite. It’s a completely free version focused just on PPC campaign management for smaller budgets.

Advertisers continue to shift from more traditional advertising channels, such as direct mail, spot cable, radio, and print ads, to online marketing channels, especially search engine marketing (SEM). However, many are unsuccessful in their SEM efforts and fail to generate the desired returns from their marketing campaigns.

Search engine marketing is a competitive and dynamic marketplace. Manually managing SEM campaigns requires significant domain knowledge and expertise, including understanding bid and competitive dynamics, keyword selection, geo-targeting, conversion tracking, traffic analytics and many other factors.

The Yield Web Marketing Suite automates SEM campaigns using our proprietary bid optimization algorithm, enabling businesses to better compete in PPC advertising. With the introduction of Yield Web Marketing Suite Lite, it’s now also the only algorithmically-driven bid management solution that optimizes campaigns across all three major search engines simultaneously and is completely free. Advertisers can manage up to $500 per month in PPC advertising at no charge. For those who choose to increase their monthly ad budgets or who wish to also use the other two modules in the Yield Web Marketing Suite (Natural Search Optimizer and Landing Page Optimizer) can simply upgrade to our standard system.  Together with our free SEO Analyzer, companies operating under tight marketing budgets now have two important tools to better their web marketing performance at no cost to them.

Check it out and let us know what you think.

Stop by Our Booth on the Expo Floor!

Yield Software will be presenting and exhibiting at SES-San Francisco 2010 next week at Moscone West.  Our booth number is 416 — Matt, Jenae, Jacob and I will be hanging out there doing demos and schmoozing, and we’d love to say hello if you’re there.

If you’re not already registered for SES, you can still get a free exhibit hall pass — just visit Search Engine Strategies San Francisco to reserve a pass.  We’re also going to be giving away a free Apple iPad (a $499 value) from business cards dropped into the fishbowl at our booth, so be sure to bring yours along and drop it into the bowl.  We’ll do the drawing at the end of the conference and ship the winner’s new iPad directly from Apple.

One more thing to keep in mind: we’ve got a SES promotion you might want to check out.  It’s called our GET SMART promo and here’s how it works:

Sign up for a Yield Web Marketing Suite account for Advertisers or for Agencies before September 15, 2010 and we will include a complimentary “Smart Start” JumpStart worth more than $500.  Your Smart Start will include: Account Set-up; a PPC JumpStart for a single campaign; and 60 days of campaign optimization by one of our PPC experts from our Professional Services team. After 60 days, you’ll be able to take over management of your campaign with ease.

Even if you’re not able to join us at SES next week, do take advantage of the Smart Start JumpStart if you don’t already subscribe to the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  It’s a great way to get off to a solid start managing your SEM campaigns more efficiently, more effectively and more profitably.

SEMPO-San Francisco Bay Area Working Group Party

Join the SEMPO San Francisco Working Group at the post-SES Conference Party on Wednesday, August 18^th.   The hour-long social mixer and networking event will be held in Room 2001 of the Moscone West building in downtown San Francisco, and will begin shortly after the day’s final learning session.  Come join the post-seminar celebration fun and capitalize on an opportunity to meet industry professionals and learn about the latest trends in the world of search.

What’s in it for you?

Complimentary food and drinks (thanks to YouTube and Google)

An opportunity to expand your Search Engine Marketing industry professionals network

An opportunity to learn more about the local SEMPO organization and provide insight for our next event in September covering Trends in Social Media Marketing

For more information, please stop by the SEMPO San Francisco booth in SES-San Francisco Expo Hall on Tuesday August 17^th or Wednesday August 18^th.  Or simply stop by room 2001 at 6:30pm and join the fun and networking!  Also, be sure to join the SEMPO San Francisco conversation and follow us on Facebook and Linked In.

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.

Let’s face it: it’s typically not recommended! Though it may happen once in awhile, for most people it just doesn’t — usually for good reason.  And yet many businesses treat first visits to their websites as if they’re expecting to go all the way on a first date.

Since we all need that little thing called revenue in order to stay in business and be profitable, many businesses just focus on tracking their one main revenue-generating action as a conversion event for online activity.  Whether it’s a product purchase or generation of a lead, all online campaigns and keywords are judged by their ability to immediately result in this one conversion.

However, in this day and age of information abundance, reviews, referral sources, and the like, many searchers do lots of poking around before they are ready to take that conversion step.  There are four generally-accepted steps in the sales cycle you should keep in mind:

Ignorance — This is the phase when a person is unaware of their need of a particular product or service that might make their lives or their own business somehow better or more efficient or less expensive.

Awareness — When a customer has become aware of a need and the means of addressing it, but is still learning, investigating and preparing.

Engagement — A customer-prospect has selected your company as one that might address their need.

Investment — Success! A prospective customer becomes a paying customer.

Most people these days go through these four stages of the sales cycle.  So rather than throwing all of your eggs in one basket, hoping to convince your visitor to “go all the way” on that very first visit, we encourage you to offer different avenues to make a connection on that first visit.  This will enable you to foster the relationship and be the one the searcher comes back to when they are ready to convert.

For prospects in the “ignorance” phase, it’s important to speak to a particular pain point.  Call out that pain and the clear cure for it.  For instance, say you sell solar panels.  You may want to run PPC ads like this one:

Energy Bills High?

Solar is more affordable

than ever – learn how.

solarxyz.com/lowermybills

(Hopefully, this is a fake company… we intended it to be!)  In this instance, the ad is addressing a common customer pain point: high household energy bills.  They point out why an alternative could be viable for the searcher.  And they entice the searcher with an answer to their pain (”lower my bills”).

Next, during the “awareness” phase, think about why your searcher is likely to be hunting around gathering more information:

Are they looking for the best price?

Do they need reviews / ratings / referrals before selecting?

Are they researching a gift for someone else?

Are they sure about the exact product accessory they need?

Did they simply get interrupted in the middle of their search?

Are they not currently using the right device or computer that they intend on converting from?

Do they need to run it by someone else?

We could go on and on — there are so many different reasons why people aren’t ready to commit on the first click.  After you figure out the likely scenarios for your particular offering, you can start to think about the types of valuable information for a connection that will enable you to stick in the mind of the visitor and leave a lasting presence they will return to.

The content that you offer to make the connection will need to be unique, valuable, helpful and just plain irresistible.  Following are some additional “connection” ideas that you can try out:

Newsletter sign-up.  You’ll need to say more than just “sign up” though – for instance, does the newsletter contain offers?  What type of content is in it that will entice them or be useful to them?

Facebook / Twitter following.  Again –why would they want to do this?  Is there some enticing content from your community that you can use as a teaser?  Are there special offers you have for your social following?

Webinar sign-up.  Do you have any relevant upcoming webinars that might be of interest that you can encourage them to sign up for?

Conference sign-up.  Any upcoming conferences that you will be attending?  Perhaps you are going to have some form of a giveaway that they can sign up for.

Notification sign-up.  Can you entice them to sign-up for an email notification if there is a price changes in the future?  Or would they like to be notified of future reviews that are posted, or stock level notifications?

Third-party data.  Do you have valuable industry or market data that you can share with them – any analyst or third party reports, or review aggregations that would help guide them?

Personalized information.  Can you provide them with any information that is personalized to them?  The ROI on a purchase, help finding the right solution through a series of questions, previewing how something will look for them, analysis of something that is theirs, any form of a calculator, etc.  Make sure to capture the results so you can also email them to them.

Personal response to questions, or personal review of something.  If an expert can help guide them in a personalized, non-salesy way, this is often attractive.

Contests.  Everyone loves to win things!

Polls.  Ask them for their input on something about what you offer.  This will usually require a strong incentive – but even showing the results of an ongoing poll that you have, that they can participate in can often times be enough.

A product brochure, white paper, recent use-case video, etc.  Any content that can help them learn more about you after they go away from your website.

After you are able to make the connection, you’ll want to spend some time nurturing it.  This gets you to the “engagement” level.  Continue to reach out to the visitor on a regular basis with more unique, valuable content along the lines of the connection they made with you.  Whether it’s an updated analysis, a new notification, some interesting community content from Twitter, or some new poll results, keep the conversation going and stay fresh in their mind.

Once you’ve gotten your additional connection points in place on your landing pages and throughout your website, you’ll want to make sure you are tracking their success.  Track all the meaningful events for your online campaigns, realizing that any connection made carries value – so if you have keywords that are bringing in lots of new connections, but no immediate revenue you’ll want to keep them alive to see if your nurture-rate to revenue is high.  For each of these connection points, you’ll want to monitor how often they bring about return visits and eventually generate revenue.  This will help you know where to focus your efforts as you go forward.

All of which gets you to that “all-the-way goal”: investment.

What to Read When You Put Down Those Stieg Larsson Novels

It’s summer and I understand everywhere else in the United States, it’s hot.  In San Francisco, we’ve endured day after day of thick fog (during my run through Golden Gate Park the other day, I swear it was snowing) so I can only imagine what it’s like to lay in a backyard hammock reading great books (now, on my iPad) while sipping ice cold lemonaid.

Recently, I was at a meeting where the group I was addressing asked what blogs and websites I regularly read to stay on top of trends in search and social marketing.  It occurred to me that it might be fun to list them in this column, together with some great career-oriented reading.

Every morning, when I fire up my laptop upon arriving at work, I first read the newsletters from MediaPost.  I subscribe to Media Daily News, Search Marketing Daily, Social Media & Marketing Daily, and Mobile Marketing Daily – each of which is a delivered via email.  I like these because MediaPost does a great job of leveraging my peers and the investigative reporting of its bloggers to keep me abreast of breaking and trending news in my industry. (I’m also a regular columnist for Search Marketing Daily, so there’s that, too…)

In the realm of general marketing and advertising, I’m a huge fan of 5BlogsBeforeLunch by David Ibsen.  He does a great job rounding up the big news of the day and bringing his own insightful (and often wryly funny) point of view.  I also love the Marketing Pilgrim by Andy Beal, which is more generally focused on search and social marketing, but increasingly includes news from across the marketing industry.  I also regularly read The New York Times Media & Advertising section and the daily blog posts in AdAge Digital.  Finally, I regularly read the Forrester Marketing & Strategy Blog.

In the world of search marketing, I read what you might expect: Search Engine Land (Danny Sullivan is still the top dog in all things search, in my opinion); Search Engine Watch; Matt Cutts’ Blog; the AdCenter Search Blog; the Y! Search Blog; and the Google’s Inside AdWords Blog.

If you’re on the geeky side (or are finally ready to show some ROI on your marketing programs), read the blog Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik, which focuses on Web analytics.  While you’re at it, read his book “Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity.”

In terms of more general Web 2.0 stuff, I still love Seth Godin’s missives.  His newish book is a great read if you haven’t read it already (“Linchpin” available here.)  Amber Naslund, in addition to being the Director of Community at Radian6, is a terrific blogger and has one of the better Twitter handles in the biz: @ambercadabra.  (If you’re looking for another good Twitter handle to follow, check out Jeremiah Owyang.)  Also, I still read John Battelle’s blog, which I started reading years ago while I was at Technorati (it’s served me well!)  And 37 Signals’ Signal vs. Noise Blog is educational (and very often entertaining.)  Finally, I really like Brian Solis’s informative and thought-provoking blog.  He’s also got a new book out called “Engage!”, which I really encourage you to read.

Another book worth picking up for a summertime read (once you’ve burned through all those red-hot Stieg Larsson novels) is Charlene Li’s new book “Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead”.  Also, you should pre-order the book by my MediaPost colleague, Aaron Goldman (“Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google”), which comes out in August.

A reader of mine over at MediaPost just recommended “The Big Short” by Michael Lewis (he was featured on NPR, “60 Minutes” on CBS and reviewed in The New York Times.  I’m not too sure how dissecting the stock market machinations leading to the Great Recession will go with a hammock and a an ice-cold lemonaid, but nothing ventured…  I hope you’re having a great summer!

Check out the Googleplex’s Innovations in Web Marketing

Google announced today a new “lab” site where you can find all the beta products they’re testing relating to Web marketing.  Google has done this for its other lines of business (apps, YouTube, etc.), but this is the first time they’ve aggregated all their marketing product innovations in a single location.

It’s definitely worth checking out.  Here’s a sampling of what Google’s got brewing in its Web marketing lab:

Product Listing Ads (Search Advertising / PPC)

Product Listing Ads are search ads that include richer product information – including product image, price, and merchant name – without requiring additional keywords or ad text.

Above-the-Fold Advertising (Content Network)

A statistically driven solution determines whether impressions on the Google Content Network will show ads completely on-screen when a user’s browser window loads.  By excluding the “below the fold” category in your AdWords account, ads in your Google Content Network campaign will only be eligible to appear when a placement displays your ad fully upon page-load, with no scrolling required.

Remarketing (Search Advertising, Content Network)

Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web.  When you use remarketing, you’ll tag pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, you could add a “TV” tag on all of the pages where you sell televisions. You can then create an AdWords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a special offer on TVs) to people who’ve visted these pages as they browse sites across the Google Content Network.

Click-to-Call Phone Extensions (Search Advertising)

When people search for goods or services using their mobile phones, they often prefer to call a store rather than visit that store’s website. Now you can make it even easier for potential customers to reach you by adding a click-to-call business phone number in ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers.

There are still other innovations for you to explore.  Obviously, as these become fleshed out Yield Software will look at how best to integrate such services into our Yield Web Marketing Suite over time to complement our Paid Search Optimizer, Natural Search Optimizer and Landing Page Optimizer.  In the meantime, you may want to play with one or more of these innovations to see if there are any positive impacts on your overall Web marketing strategy.

We recommend starting small when testing new or evolving Web marketing services, though Google has an excellent track record of releasing Beta products only after extensive testing, so you’re on pretty solid ground.  Still, if something looks right for your strategy, carve out a small part of your larger Web marketing budget and a constrained segment of your target market, and then see what sort of results you’re able to produce.

Do share with us your experiences – and what you’d like to see integrated into the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  We’d love to get your insights at suggestions[at]yieldsoftware[dot]com.

We often get questions from customers about which search engines would be best to run their search ads on. What search engines, they often ask, present the road most likely to get them to advertising success?  While in most instances the answer is “optimize across all three major search engines to get at the best possible results”, for some businesses it may make sense to focus on alternative strategies.  But how?

In order to answer this question, let’s think about what you are looking for in a search engine and what pay-per-click (PPC) advertising objectives you’re trying to reach. The answer usually includes some variation of the following:

You want…

exposure and results – leads, sales, strong word-of-mouth, etc.

at an…

affordable cost-per-click and a profitable return on investment.

I’m sure it’s not breaking news, but this scenario can often be quite a challenge for many businesses — particularly small businesses — to achieve. Most businesses just starting out on PPC advertising try out Google because it’s well-known and because, let’s face it, it generates about 65 percent of the total search traffic on the Web. But there are some alternatives out there that may produce results as good as or better than Google at a lower overall cost per acquisition. Sometimes, in other words, it’s best to consider the road less traveled.  Try thinking about your options like this:

1) The Interstate – Google

What’s possible: huge exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: bigger budgets (i.e., $1,000 per month for less competitive keywords; tens of thousands of dollars or more per month for very competitive keywords) and hard work.

For exposure and volume of visitors, this is the place to be seen. And Google is more than capable of bringing in very good results. However, it is also the winner in the categories of highest cost per click and budget you’ll need for exposure.  Because there is such high traffic and competition on Google, they’ve had to institute some very stringent measures in the form of a quality score system, which can be tough to understand and navigate if you are not an expert.

So, although it’s a big wide road with lots of traffic, Google isn’t a casual Sunday drive. This search engine requires a detailed map with lots of turn-by-turn instructions to actually achieve real results.

2) The Side Road – Bing

What’s possible: decent exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: a medium-size budget (i.e., starting at $750 per month for less competitive keywords in less competitive markets).

Though a side road, Bing is no bumpy byway you use only to avoid heavy traffic – in fact, we’ve found Bing can be a shortcut to great online advertising results. Our recent experience with PPC ad campaign results from Bing is, quite simply, “Wow!” If you haven’t tried it yet, it would be well worth your while to give it a shot.

Bing very often provides a lower cost-per-click than Google, which means a lower budget is required for full exposure. Bing also offers a much easier on-ramp since its quality guidelines are much less opaque than Google’s. With Bing, you can just turn on something basic and get good results without all the hassle of divining what your quality score is and why. We’ve also seen very impressive traffic quality and conversion results from Bing over the last couple months. It looks like Bing is certainly on the rise as a search engine and should not be underestimated.

3) Well Off the Beaten Path – Business.com

What’s possible: modest exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: smaller budgets can suffice (i.e. $250 per month for less competitive keywords).

While everyone has heard of Google and Bing, not everyone has considered Business.com. Many businesses just don’t have the budget to compete for the keywords in their space and markets on Google and Bing. Many of these advertisers, however, have found PPC advertising success with Business.com. It’s the exact same style of advertising as conducted on Google and Bing, but for much lower costs, while still delivering results. So if your budget is too limited for Google and your space is too crowded on Bing, try out Business.com.

4) Off-Road – Facebook

What’s possible: targeted exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: small-to-medium size budgets.

Though not exactly the same sort of PPC advertising as the others, the ad platform on Facebook is similar in many ways to what you will find on Google, Bing and Business.com.  On the Facebook platform, you specify keywords that folks you’re targeting use in their profiles and updates, and you can also specify demographic, psychographic and geographic characteristics to further target your ad.  While mostly text, Facebook ads can also include a single graphical element, which its easy-to-use system helps you to incorporate into your ads step-by-step.

Facebook is vying with Google to be the most-visited website in the world (it may have already surpassed Google, in fact), and it’s a traffic source that should not be overlooked.  Because it’s not exactly the same kind of thoroughfare as the search engines listed above, you do need to spend some time understanding the differences and nuances involved.  But don’t let that deter you from experimenting with this potentially rich source of traffic to your website.

5) Uncharted Territory – Yahoo! Search

What’s possible: good exposure and profitable campaigns.

What’s required: larger budgets.

Later this year, Bing and Yahoo! will integrate search engine operations, and Bing will begin providing results for searches completed on Yahoo!  Currently one of the top three most visited sites in the world, with an enormously popular email system and some of the best-trafficked content portals on the Web (think Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Personals or Yahoo! Autos), Yahoo! Search should not be overlooked.  Still, it’s clear this search engine is in a state of massive transition.  It can be tough to optimize campaigns on Yahoo! and its rules are in many ways quite dissimilar to those in use on Google and Bing, which means you need to bring a whole different intuitive sense to using the system.  And costs-per-click for your keywords are often similar (or identical) to Google’s, though you can get some bargains on Yahoo!  Finally, in our experience traffic and conversions from Yahoo! have fallen behind Bing’s performance of late, so while there are still opportunities on Yahoo!, it’s probably best not to use Yahoo! as a primary search advertising conduit until the Bing-Yahoo! integration is completed late this year and early next year.

Currently, the Yield Web Marketing Suite makes it both easy and profitable to coordinate and optimize your PPC ad campaigns across Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing.  And we’re actively looking at how to expand to include additional PPC ad platforms.  But let’s face it: in most cases, the best road map for acquiring traffic at the lowest possible cost is optimizing your PPC campaigns across the three best-known, most-used engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing.  Our services experts are always available to you to help you to get the most from your pay-per-click advertising campaigns and to provide objective advice about roads less traveled, so never hesitate to ask for help.

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, it must be stated that most often we find that this one is mostly paranoia. And it can be tough to prove.  However, if you are sure this is happening to you, there are some proactive measures you can take. For example, you can exclude specific geographies or even IP addresses from your pay-per-click campaign to prevent competitor from viewing your ads. Just be careful not to lose out on new leads due to worries about competitors.

Competitors writing false negative reviews.

This one is always heart-breaking for us to hear, but desperate competitors have been known to do this quite aggressively. What can you do? Comment back. Try to address the issues as if they are real to see if they stop. If not, try reaching out to the site where they are being posted. Some sites will work with you on removing false reviews. Also, try to get your customer base incentivized to post positive reviews about you, so that good and real customer feedback is much more prominent than your unethical competitor’s words.  Customer loyalty will always overwhelm unethical competitive behavior.

Competitors using your trademark in their ad copy.

You don’t want your competitor using your product or company name in their ads – particularly in a negative context. This one requires you to protect your trademarks. Monitor for improper or illegal usage of your trademarks and file complaints of any violations the search engines. Ads that infringe on your trademarks will be disallowed from appearing by the search engines.

Next, let’s look at some examples of ethical competitive maneuvering, but which can also be abused:

Tools focused on “spying” on your competitors.

The word “spying” makes you think you might be doing something unethical. However, most of these tools focus on providing information that is publicly available, but also often difficult to aggregate for an individual.  One other aspect to consider here is how the spy-tool company is gathering data – so make sure this is an approved method for data collection. For the most part, this is an okay strategy for supplementing your online competitive knowledge; however, much of the data should be taken with a grain of salt. We haven’t yet come across a tool that has spot-on accurate data, or data that isn’t very stale. Still, many can tools can provide general information that can help you develop robust sets of competitive keywords.

Attending competitor’s webinars, downloading white papers, taking free trials, and subscribing to feeds.

These are examples of information companies make available to the public — including their competitors. However, if you are attending an online event or downloading information using a false name or false credentials, then this crosses the ethical line. However, if you access this information, and are honest about who you are, there isn’t any problem with taking advantage of information being supplied by your competitors.  In fact, in this world of blogs and data sharing and Twitter streams, there are plenty of ethical ways you should be maintaining knowledge of your competitors — believe me: they’re staying abreast of all your activity.

Advertise on your competitor’s brand name.

Add in your competitor’s brand name and products names as keywords in your Google PPC campaigns, and have your ads show for those. This helps to make sure that potential customers give you a peak as they consider your competitor.  Just be sure NOT to use your competitor’s brands in your own ad copy — that would be unethical.

Review your competitor’s ad copy.

Check out your competitor’s ad copy. This is a great way to stay on top of their offerings and what they think their competitive advantages are. Keep up here to make sure that your offer is unique and your offers are truly competitive.  However, never copy a competitor’s ads verbatim.  Focus on your own unique points of differentiation in ad copy that’s all your own.

Review your competitor’s website (including view source).

Keep tabs on your competitor’s websites. Extensive reviews here can provide you with a wealth of information about their offerings, their clients, their management, their value proposition, etc.  If you want to know what keywords they are targeting to rank highest for on natural search, click to “view source” of their webpage. Many people have their keywords listed right in their meta keywords tag. But if the keywords aren’t there, check out frequently used words in their page title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions and content to get a feel for where they are focusing. You might choose to go head-to-head with them, or you might choose to branch out into different words to capture searches they are missing out on.

Read your competitor’s reviews.

What are people saying about your competitors? What do they like? What don’t they like? Make sure to keep tabs on feedback trends so you can improve your own standards in areas where you don’t think you align.  For instance, if your competitor is consistently praised in reviews for excellent customer service, and you’re not, well… you know what you need to do!

It’s okay to be a fierce competitor and to maintain tabs on what your key competition is doing.  Refrain from crossing ethical lines, and you’ll always be engaged in a good, clean fight.  And when you encounter a competitor whose ethics cross the line, use established channels to put a halt to it.

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 Facebook acquired it).

Once the collaboration aspects of Wave are refined (and become better understood) and are then married with your Buzz social graph, it’s easy to see how folks might fall in love with all the ways in which you can make things happen whether for work, family events or social occasions.  Add in Aardvark, which lets you ask a question and which instantly calculates what person within your social graph is most capable of expertly answering your question within about 10 minutes, and suddenly you have a social platform many times more powerful and interesting than what’s currently available elsewhere.

So what, you may ask, do Aardvark, Buzz and Wave have to do with search?

First, it’s all about social.  Google sees the rise of social networks including Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, as a challenge to its search hegemony.  After all, if you can get answers to questions, or advice on what to do, or find the information you’re looking for via a trusted social network, that is one less search you do on Google.  Which means one less opportunity for Google to offer up ads.

The other reason, then, is that by building its own social tools into the growing user base for Gmail, Apps and iGoogle, their algorithms will be able to see what sorts of conversations, questions or responses you offer not only through email correspondence or in a collaborative exchange on Wave, but also via Aardvark and, by extension, Facebook and Twitter.  Which represents an opportunity to serve highly targeted, extremely relevant ads in ways that go well beyond the keyword search.

While many consumers chafe at the idea that ads might be targeted to them based on their (presumably private) conversations or collaborative activity, the truth is those ads are likely to be of real service at the exact right moment in time.

Obviously, should this play out as imagined, this is great for Google.  But it’s also great for advertisers.  And, I would argue, it’s good for consumers, too.  While there are very legitimate privacy concerns with the way Buzz was initially rolled out, continuing changes are addressing those concerns.

Before you know it, Aardvark, together with a good Buzz, could find itself riding an awesome Wave.  Which means search marketers have something to look forward to.