My Top 12 SEM Online Resources
TweetTo ring in 2012, here is a list of my top 12 most frequently read Search Engine Marketing resources. I visit most of these sites every day – so I tend to say “yep I read that earlier” a lot. If you want to be as much of a “Great News Everyone” downer as I can be, go ahead and give these a look. In all seriousness, I get a lot of great news, tactics, and strategic ideas from these websites. And I am very thankful to the people putting in the hours of work to make them so good. :List Below: Alltop | http://sem.alltop.com/ The SEM information King. This is an aggregator of most SEM articles with some great usability and scanability. Alltop makes it easy to cruise through the top SEM stories of the day if you are short on time. This often leads to me finding new blogs to frequently visit. DAILY READ All Things D | http://allthingsd.com/ This is the new kid on the block; at least to my reading list. So far it has been a great resource for breaking technology news, which includes search engine news and all things Internet media. Interestingly enough, it is owned by DOW Jones and published by the Wall Street Journal. Check this one out. DAILY READ Search Engine Watch | http://searchenginewatch.com/ppc One of the classics with a semi-recent redesign. This is a go-to site to find a wide variety of search engine articles written by experts in the field. I link to the PPC focused part of the site, but Search Engine Watch has dynamite content for SEO, Analytics and all things Internet marketing. DAILY READ Search Engine Land | http://searchengineland.com/ The people who bring us SMX search marketing conference run a pretty good blog, too. Over 30k likes on Facebook and LinkedIn is a good sign that this is a go-to search destination. If you can’t make it to the world-class search conference – at least check out the blog on a regular basis. WEEKLY READ Official Google AdWords Blog | http://adwords.blogspot.com/ Why not hear it from the horse’s mouth? Sure you can get conspiracy theory blog posts that cover an alpha AdWords test, but you may as well get the real details from Google. Besides covering their features in detail, they often share some industry insights and link to other useful tools that you may...
Read More7 ½ Myths about PPC
Tweet7 ½ Myths about PPC. Because there are just too many complete lists in the world. 1. Big Pockets only, during Black Friday and Cyber Monday If you’re selling TVs or Laptops, yes, you have an insane amount of competition and should Not do major holidays. *Only play with the big guys if your site has the right offers and value-adds to your visitors. I would also stick to long-tail keywords that have been proven winners for you in the past. BUT if you are specialized in B2C or practically any B2B, don’t worry about big retailer competition. You should be able to run smoothly with your normal budget. Target and Amazon won’t be bidding on cold air condensers or 3M label glue. 2. Just press play, it takes less than an hour to start PPC It takes hours of research, years of experience, and hours of implementation to do it right. Those who say otherwise, Self-made Guru or Agency, are probably not doing a great job – and you should look elsewhere for PPC services. True Pay Per Click / Search Engine Marketing professionals specialize in one main skill. If they are also a designer, UXer, programmer, and delivery driver – it’s very rare that they would be great at PPC. 3. Cha-ching. Instant sales! Google AdWords defaults to a 30 day cookie for a reason. They understand that sales don’t happen instantly, and often times not on the first visit. If you as a business owner think that PPC is a magic bullet to your bottom line, I have some snake oil to sell you. It takes time to figure out the best use of PPC for each business. And if you don’t have a few months to invest and fine-tune, then you should wait until you can afford it. PPC is an investment, treat it as one and give it time to grow, but also have an exit plan to cut losses if it goes poorly. 4. I run the business, so I can run PPC! And my nephew can when I’m on vacation. *See #2 above. Let a pro handle it. But work with the PPC professional, for goodness sake. Work as a team. You are THE expert in your business. You know the keywords regular customers use. You know the hot products or products with the biggest profit margin. Share that insight with your...
Read MoreMy Secret AdWords Arrow CTR Booster ⇒
The time has come for me to reveal a 2 year long secret…I have been cheating in AdWords! I found a loophole in ad copy restrictions that has allowed me to write a select number of ads with an arrow ⇒ in the copy! It has boosted CTR over nearly every ad I ever put it up against. You will see up to a ~15% CTR boost. The trick is to use Special ASCII HTML Character Codes to make the arrow. You can find the code on an ASCII site or just copy this ⇒ and never lose it. You simply past this into your ad copy and away you go; boosted CTRs in most cases. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want an arrow pointing to their CTA or their value prop? It grabs the eye and pushes it into your next statement. It’s a glorious thing. I have run into a few approval issues in the past, so you have to use it wisely. I like to put it in established campaigns that have never had an approval issue. Maybe it’s me being superstitious, but that has slipped it past the approval a lot easier. The trick is simple, but use it wisely. You don’t want every ad out there with arrows, otherwise the differentiator is null. In the past few years of using this with about 5 different clients, I have seen anywhere from 8-14% lift in CTR versus the same copy without the arrow. Traditionally, in place of the arrow would be a period, comma, plus sign, or hyphen. The arrow took all of them down. So why am I revealing my ultimate secret now? Short answer: Because I left the agency life for corporate. Longer answer: Because I can’t risk having an ad disapproved by legal at my new job, and we actually have Google reps that care about us and look at our accounts. Weekly calls and near daily communication with our Google reps doesn’t leave me much room to do things like this anymore. So I figured I would share the love with my agency and freelance friends out there. The worst that can happen is you get your ad disapproved. The upside is you get a good CTR and your ads look and perform better than your competition. *There is a good chance that a Google rep will read this...
Read MoreBrick to Click Failure, an Online Marketing Lesson
I‘m not a business owner, but have worked alongside CEOs, COOs, and General Managers over the past 6 years to learn the ins and outs of pureplay eCommerce, online with retail heritage, and multi-channel businesses. I have learned the tough lessons as well shared the victories with them. My eCommerce experience has had its ups and downs, along with the success and failures of business. I have been lucky enough to be hands-on with the operations, but also lucky enough to learn the hard lessons without impacting my bank account. Below is a typical situation of an online business with a retail heritage. This has happened to multiple businesses I have worked with in the past. They will go nameless; but real experience has shaped this advice. The Short Introduction: Congratulations, you have a very successful business. Your multi-thousand square foot office, toll-free number, warehouse, showroom, and local brand recognition are all very impressive. You have won the business game. Now you decide to go and conquer the Internet while you’re at it. It makes sense. Many businesses simply do the same thing they did when they started their traditional business. They built it, and expect customers to come. So, they commission a web development company to build them a website. Then they load up the products, slap their 300 dpi logo in the top left corner and wait for the money to flow in. They will soon be rich and plan on telling their other business group buddies how easy it was. It’s not Apples to Apples: The Internet does not have busy roads to your front door, location doesn’t matter. Consumers don’t care where you are, as long as their experience is good and you get them their product in a timely fashion. Don’t charge tax and offer free shipping and you have yourself a happy customer, even if you’re in the middle of Wyoming. The Internet is not influenced by your 20 closest business friends. Old school word of mouth is weak. So you impressed your traditional business friends with your website and they told their friends and family. Chances are that many of those friends of friends already have your offer fulfilled online by someone else. And if they don’t, they are still going to price-shop, offer-shop, find coupons, and find better deals somewhere other than your website. Internet friends are not loyal. You...
Read MoreYour Link is Worthless Without Tracking
Attention small business owners, enterprise marketing directors, and social media mavens: the following two words can help you stay in business, get a raise, or bring campaign enlightenment to your efforts. TRACK EVERYTHING. NOT easier said than done. This is Legos and hopscotch…what I’m saying is that a kid can do it. (Please deal with my use of caps lock and bold during this adventure, I’m PASSIONATE about analytics.) Would you blindly hand $100,000 to a search engine? How about $5,000 to an email marketing company? $1,000 on a social media campaign? $500 to print a QR code on your flyers? Then why would you launch ANY SINGLE campaign without analytics tracking attached? There are plenty of people that are still just sending traffic to a website, hoping that the traffic will do what they want, and the overall website results will be good enough for them to keep their job. This is dumb. We do not live on a single lane street; there are dozens and hundreds of traffic sources sending legitimate traffic to your website. And when you are paying for that traffic, with time or money, you NEED to be tracking it all the way through. Enough evangelization; I could go all night on how people are not tracking their campaigns properly. By appending a small snippet of tracking code to the end of your link / url you will be justifying most of your spend on advertising, social, or whatever other campaigns you use to drive traffic to your website. Sorry big guys with WebTrends, Omniture or Coremetrics. I’m speaking to Google Analytics specifically from here on out. GA makes it insanely easy to tag a URL in a matter of seconds. The same theory applies to ALL analytics suites. Simply go here to build your custom tracking URL: Google URL Builder Or use some examples below to get started. Email Tracking Examples: Source = MailChimp (I like to put the email provider, but this could just be Email) Medium = Email (interchangeable with Source many times) Content = Hero Banner (could be footer link, product link, etc) Campaign = Self Promotion Campaign (name of the campaign) https://jordonmeyer.com/about?utm_source=MailChimp &utm_medium=Email&utm_content=HeroBanner &utm_campaign=SelfPromotionCampaign Facebook Example: Source = Facebook Medium = Social Content = Brand Awareness Banner ad Campaign = Brand Awareness August 2011 https://jordonmeyer.com/about?utm_source=Facebook &utm_medium=Social&utm_content=BrandAwarenessBanner &utm_campaign=BrandAwarenessAug2011 Twitter Example: Source = Twitter Medium = Social Content = Brand Awareness...
Read MoreThe Google Comeback: Give Credit to Small Business
Google stock (GOOG) is on a rapid rise this week and up around 20% for the month reaching their yearly high. I’m not going to act like I’m a day trader, but some of the BIG influencers are pretty obvious. They are SMALL. Small business is driving the Google monster. Stop giving me money, Google. I get $2000 from Google each quarter. Why? Because I’m a certified AdWords professional and they show me their appreciation with 20 $100 vouchers for AdWords. The catch is that in order to use the voucher, it has to be a new account. They are hoping that I act as their sales team and acquire 20 new customers. Not only new customers for me, but more for Google. It’s a brilliant way to acquire small business customers. What corporation is cash-strapped enough to jump at a $100 voucher? Not many. How many small businesses would like $100 of “free” advertising? Many. Personally, I am tired of getting free money from Google. Another $2000 in my inbox. What am I supposed to do with that? It’s almost like getting the Penny Saver in my snail mail. Into the trash it goes. Just like I’m not going to spend time to save $0.30 on something I don’t need, I’m not going to spend time finding a client who will jump all over a free $100 of media spend. As an online advertising professional who manages clients that spend upwards of $100k per month, why bother with someone spending $1000? It’s not my cup of coffee. But for many people it is. And that’s what Google banks on. The real value of that $100 voucher can be 10’s of thousands of dollars for Google’s top line every year, for each small business account they have. I think they are finally realizing how valuable small businesses can be. And they are going after it very aggressively. What else is Google banking on? Well, banking. Credit to be exact. Announced today by Reuters, Google is now offering a Google Credit Card to businesses. Again…how many large corporations are in need of a credit line for advertising? Not many. How many small businesses could use a credit line for advertising? Many. Another brilliant move by Google to increase their small business portfolio. If you need more proof, here it is: Google Small Business Center This is where small businesses go to...
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