Category: SEO and Paid Search

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SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

Shoveling

It seems that this week I am destined to shovel. We’ve had about 6 inches of sleet (frozen rain) fall throughout the day so I spent about an hour chipping my car out of the ice.

I’m also shoveling at work though. I still can’t get the Saleforce.com Google AdWords integration to work. We may have to trash our last round of videos. Of course maybe that’s not such a big deal since the price of adwords continues to spin up so fast that we probably won’t bother with campaigns by the end of the next 6 months. I’m busy trying to pull together our next two webinars and that’s nothing but logistics, as are the two upcoming trade shows.

I dedicate today to Winston Churchill – “If you are going through hell – keep going.”

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Geek Stuff SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

More on Click Fraud and Sausage

A couple weeks back I wrote a post about The Sausage Manifesto, a great piece by Jeffrey Rohrs talking about click fraud. Mr. Rohrs did a fantastic job summing up some complaints advertisers have with pay per click. My perspective was not as promising as his; I saw a number of reasons why the search engines have no reason to address click fraud and tried to be clever with my Bratwurst Defense.

I was kind of bummed that it didn’t generate any further conversation (pretty heavy on the geek factor, I know), so I was very happy to get an email today that it had been picked up in The Scotland SEO Blog. How cool is that! I may have to swing by there on the upcoming UK tour!

As far the conversation – ASM’s post is saying “suck it up” fraud is a cost of doing business, and I have to agree. There was a speaker at SES Chicago and I’ll have to dig through my notes to find her name, but she had a great point – the problem is not click fraud, it’s click crap – the clicks from the wrong people that your creative is bringing in that are not really leads. My gut is that’s where the real savings are to be generated.

Hooray for Scotland!

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Brain Buster SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

Sell your Google, here comes Wikipedia

Remember when Yahoo ruled the world? How long ago was that? 7 years?

In the past 2 months I’ve seen some interesting signs that Wikipedia is on a tear like we’ve never seen. I monitor 7 major keywords that I want to score on and since Q4 2006 wikipedia is on page one for all of these terms.

It’s also a major referrer for all of my sites. In 2 months.
So the question is: Will Google shut off the oxygen? Or is it already too late?

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Email Marketing Lead Generation Productivity Booster SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search

Salesforce.com in Boston

So I went to the Hyatt Harborside (right next to the airport with a nice view back on the Boston skyline, small place though) for the Salesforce event today. It was time well spent, even if just for getting to hear from a product manager directly. He was able to explain Apex in about 5 sentences better than anything I’ve read anywhere.

Apex is a language that you can query and script Salesforce with. It’s a new language that looks alot like a mashup of SQL and Java. They key is it runs on Salesforce servers. The product manager was a hardcore admin in a prior life and was talking about how they would set up a linux box out in the dmz to query SF and do cool stuff – for example hit the database once a day and round up all the contacts that sent in POs and send them the thank you message and kick the accounting system to send them an invoice. Sort of like Automated Procedures for Goldmine folk, but on steroids.

My hopes for finding a SF/Adwords ninja were dashed when I was one of the few (maybe only?) guy to raise his hand when they asked who was using it out of the probably 200+ people in the room. Either I really do have superpowers, or I was the one-eyed man in a room full of blind people.

Some other interesting stuff – ConVoq has webinars integrated into SF including VOIP, Dreamfactory has some project management and even SCM stuff that I need to check out. SalesGenius can tell you when your contacts are visiting your site (and also did a cool lead gen that got me a $5 Starbucks card). iNeo had some interesting stuff that automated the creation of landing pages. And one of these days I’ll get a chance to become an ExactTarget customer again, their integration is very cool and would take some labor out of the cycle and standardize outgoing messages.

Overall it’s time well spent to see what the next round of features will be. Also a major brainbuster – I gave Salesforce kudos for their ideaExchange – basically a Digg site for features for the product managers. I didn’t realize that this fit into a master plan for them of having startups create apps in apex – using ideaExchange as the perfect customer survey tool. They even have office space in the valley for these people to use, and of course VC will be trolling weekly. Brilliant! I’m buying shares this week.

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SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

The Bratwurst Defense

There’s been a lot of discussion going on about The Sausage Manifesto, a great peice of writing by Jeffrey K. Rohrs that is an open letter to the major search engines about some of the problems with pay-per-click advertising. Mr. Rohrs is living right out on the cutting edge of click fraud, and talking about something even more radical – auditing.

For M Show fans that appreciate the explanation of the Inside Baseball – those paid ads in Google on the right charge the advertisers every time somebody clicks on them. The people who advertise alot (hundreds of thousands of dollars per month) are starting to wonder about the quality of those clicks – there’s an obvious incentive to support anything that generates clicks, and more importantly – there’s an economic penalty to investigate or actively prevent fraudulent clicks that make money for everyone except the advertiser.

If you’ve read the manifesto, read on, if not and you are not sure what I am talking about, click the link above to check out the whole thing. If you already understand pay-per-click and click fraud you can jump to the major points by starting here.

For the amusement of all I decided to try my hand at a rough draft response for the search providers.
1. Talk don’t lecture – it’s not that we think you are children, the problem is that there are millions of you and you have millions of questions. It’s not possible to do one-on-one, everything must be based on algorithm, that’s how this model scales. (Ronin comment – maybe they want to get the top 500 customers in a room and start there? But I almost worry more about that for the rest of the world.)

2. Unique circumstances? We’re the most powerful information system on the planet right now (until wikipedia kicks our ass to the curb), we got there first, we got the loot. We’re unique – you are ants (see #1).

3. Invest in proportion to the problem – as long as we keep the data hidden in the black box we’re all set. Shut up and enjoy your sausage.

4. Tracking alone is not the answer – Yes, but you’re willing to pay for the clicks even though I don’t even give you the number of conversions in a default view. It’s easier to make you dig for it, or better yet – get tired of digging and get back to stuffing your face with the sausage.

5. More customer service – ROFLMMFAO! Right, when in the history of the world has anyone added service without adding a premium pricing plan. Like that’s gonna happen. I have a better chance of getting good service at a retail store in the mall.

6. Click Quality Education Resource Center – Hmmm, build a marginally effective school that eats up the revenue – sorry, you’ve got us confused with Public Schools. (Ronin comment: I was educated in the public schools and I feel I was well prepared for the world.)
7. Get the IAB involved – Silence. (Ronin comment: Adding an industry association would be turning the sausage dial up to 11, but that’s just my personal bias.)

8. Click fraud firms – silent stare. subject begins to perspire. (Ronin comment – I LOVE THESE GUYS. This is the coolest field, these guys are the new Eliot Ness posse rolling into town. They are blowing on the fuse on the dynamite to get it to burn faster. You are the Jack Bauers of search. Let the questioning begin!)

9. Punish the guilty – Why waste money on litigation against someone that could be your best customer next week. Besides we know the courts are going to be behind on this for maybe even 10 years and we haven’t even been around that long. We are beyond the law.

10. SCMODS for the Perps (sorry for the oblique Blues Brothers reference) – We don’t want to punish those who know the system best (see #9). And building an offender database is pretty Big Brother don’t you think? (Ronin – I like this one a whole lot too. The auditors could do this amongst themselves and start printing money. I think I’m in the wrong industry.)

11. Give me data or give me death! – There’s no defense for this one, something will have to be done. But maybe we’ll only listen to a class action suit – I’m sure there are no attorneys out there looking for a deep pocket with only $152B in market cap out there. Or better yet, we’ll just wait for the federal regulation.

That’s it folks, I’m done channeling. In case you couldn’t tell, today is the first real day of winter cold here in the northeast. That’s why we get cranky.

Why can’t an engine with volume just switch to a pay per conversion? I’d pay 10x for that…

Thanks to Mr. Rohrs for starting a great discussion.

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SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

Google Content Network

Twice now we’ve experimented with the Google Content Network and it’s been the same story both times. As soon as you activate it the clicks come pouring in, and they are mostly garbage. There are two problems with this – the economic and google juice cost (I use google juice for any stat that affects googles black box ranking that you are given when you play the game).

So many clicks get expensive quickly, our campaigns easily jump 4x in cost. More disappointing is the impact on clickthrough rates. Based on feedback from SES in Chicago I’m shooting for half a percent and when the content network is on we often drop down to one one hundredth. As soon as we switch it off it pops right back up to the .4-.5 range. I’d like to think that Google is taking this into account in the scoring, but no guarantees of that. It’s not a tough decision though, as long as the network makes the cost per lead 3 times what I’m willing to pay, it’s a no brainer.

I’d love to hear if anyone else out there has seen similar numbers.

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Productivity Booster SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

SalesForce.com for the Treo

About a month ago I noticed that with the exception of a “dummies” book there were very few print resources out there on the big SF so I decided to turn to the blogosphere. I stumbled across SalesforceWatch.com and found a post that they were looking for usability testers for the next release of Salesforce for the Treo.

Because I was an alternate I never got an NDA, but I’m not going to yap and betray Melissa, who gave me the guided tour. The one thing that I liked the most is already in the existing version – the ability to see the latest Opportunities that have Closed as Wins. It’s a cool system but I really need to upgrade my Treo 600 to take advantage of it. In other SF news I still have not been able to get the Google AdWords/Salesforce integration to work. My server only likes forms that use “Submit” and I need to use a different term if I want the SF snippet to work. More experimenting this week to see if I can get that to work. I’m also doing a bunch of hygiene with Ringlead and that’s working well.

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Brain Buster SEO and Paid Search

Big Google is Watching You

I had a chance to chat with one of the Crayonistas last night and he tipped me off to this:

http://www.google.com/psearch

I feel like Shatner… “This is going to be big, REALLY big”

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Brain Buster Lead Generation SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

Google AdWords Quality Score

I had already been dealing with the changes in AdWords for the past couple of months, and then I had a chance to learn the latest and greatest in Chicago this week. For anybody new that might ask “What is Google AdWords” – it’s paying Google so that your ads will show up on the right side of their search results page, or if your ad is really relevant, in the blue space above the normal results.

In the past it used to be that if you had a high enough bid, you made it to the top. As the story has it, one day someone from Google Googled “Google” and found that the ads had gone from PPC (pay per click) to PPC (pills, porn, casinos). As fruit of their anger the quality score was born.

The bottom line is if your ad doesn’t get .5% click through and have a decent landing page you will ultimately pay more for your ad, and as a result not show as high on the page. Like everything else in this domain, we don’t know exactly how google does it, but there’s some statements from google and tests by marketeers that have created some best practices.

Your ad copy is important, you need to test to make sure you stay above the .5% click through. You need to decide when to walk away from a keyword if you can’t get the click through high enough (maybe modify with negative keywords, or use the exact match). You need a good landing page (preferably with the keyword on it).

The down side is if you’ve been doing this shotgun style your minimum bids will rise fast (I’ve seen keywords go from 50 cents to $10 in a week), and you will have a hard time getting a good position on the page. On the other hand, if you work hard at creating relative content you will bid and pay less than those whose ads aren’t as good, and if you do well enough you can make it over to the one box where you will perform better than on the right side.

I’ll be presenting some data and other observations on this next week at the Case Camp Second Life – now if I can figure out how to get my avatar to stop dancing…

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Brain Buster Productivity Booster SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

What is Scraping and how to stop it?

I’m at the Search Engine Strategies conference and we just had lunch with a team from Google who showed off some of the new webmaster tools (and I managed to get in a vote for a crawl error referral report to Vanessa Fox, but that’s another post). The topic of scraping was raised and Danny Sullivan mentioned that there will be a full session on it later in the week. My general rule is not to blog during business hours but since we’ve been fighting this battle at work it’s relevant (and remember that AccuRev has the Ultimate Source Control Tool).

In our Web 2.0 world you can make money just by generating traffic and putting up Google AdSense ads. For the Ronin Marketeer, you post quality content, get the traffic and are regarded as a hero by all. Another approach for those of more flexible business ethics is to copy someone else’s content and show it as your own. This is happening more and more in the blogosphere, is already an issue for corporate sites.

The practice of grabbing content from another website and posting it as your own is called scraping. I’ve never played with scripting this myself but there are varying degrees of automating this process. Most people come across it when they are googling themselves or their company and they get some results that are outside of their own domains (often blogs using a default template) that copies their content verbatim. More recently these pages often include copy from multiple websites.

So, what to do about the theives in our midst? Adam Lasnik of Google discussed this during the panel today, and here’s a summary of the answer as I heard it:

  1. Overall, “Don’t Panic”. It’s fairly easy for Google to verify this, your site published it first and your domain has been established with Google. The scraper is not established, their URL is newer and probably registered for a year or less.
  2. You can file a DCMA Takedown request with them
  3. The takedown request is good but Adam referred to it as “swatting flies”, your time is better spent staying the course – make sure you are the source for your content by continuing to crank it out and remain the source.

Keep in mind that in the grand scheme the majority of scraping is garbage and clutter, and anyone providing search results will continue to screen it. But then again, it’s yet another cat and mouse game for us to follow.

I’m learning some good stuff, more to follow.