Do you sometimes click around your AdWords account just to see if anything funny is going on?  A few months ago Google introduced custom alerts designed to notify you when your budget reaches a certain point or your CTR is tanking or any other area of concern.  To access this feature, navigate to the Keywords tab, on the bar below the graph click More actions, click Create a custom alert, then set the parameters of your alert.  To see your alerts, check the Messages section at the top of your account, or set up e-mail notification.  Unfortunately right now the custom alerts are not an option for MCC accounts, but they’ll really be a time saver for those managing individual accounts. For more info you can check out the Inside AdWords blog here: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-interface-thursdays-keep-tabs-on.html

I spent years in customer service, so many aspects of managing client relations come naturally to me.  I’m writing this today because of a conversation I had with a fellow small business owner who doesn’t share my background in serving clients.  A client of hers sent an e-mail expressing displeasure at the rate her project was moving.  Immediately my mind started racing with thoughts of what the bigger picture may be.  Typically there’s more to the story than is revealed in an e-mail.

My first piece of advise was to not respond to the client via e-mail.  This complaint warranted a phone call.  Additionally, I advised her to take the tone of the e-mail with a grain of salt. One can’t hear voice inflection or tonality in an e-mail and frequently people aren’t gifted at expressing their emotions in writing.

Next I told her that no matter whose fault it is, she is to take responsibility for it.  If it was the client’s fault and the client is a reasonable, she will realize she’s partly responsible as the conversation unfolds.  If it was my friend’s fault, then she is to own up to it and find out what the client needs in order to keep the relationship and project on track.

Customer service isn’t always easy.  I think many small business owners find it challenging when they not only have to manage business development, marketing, production, administrative duties, etc., but they also have to manage dissatisfied clients.  It is time consuming, it is distracting, but it is worth it.  Frequently small business owners can turn a difficult situation around and wind up with a very loyal customer.

A common mistake business owners make when creating their profile on LinkedIn is to call themselves “Owner”.  This does not describe what you actually do, so it’s best, for the purposes of being found in a search, to use a description with industry keywords as your title.  For example, I am an Internet Marketing Specialist at Search Ad Marketing. A friend who owns a travel business is a ‘Travel Expert”.  These terms are more likely to be used as keywords in a search than “Owner”.

If you change your title, be mindful of any recommendations you have that were tied to the old title.  These may be moved to the unassigned state.  If this happens to you, please follow these steps:

• Go to the left-hand navigation menu. Click ‘Recommendations’ under the ‘Profile’ sub-menu.
• Scroll down to the ‘Unassigned recommendations’ part of the page. Click ‘Show ‘Recommendations’.
• You can now assign each recommendation to a specific experience listing.

Good luck with your search and find objectives!

Social networking and social media outlets should not be ignored by small business.  Sure, it is time consuming and often one can get side tracked, but if the small business owner wants to be proactive in the hunt for new clients, maintaining current clients and rebuilding relationships with past clients, social media is a great, free, easy way to network with people already engaged with your product or service.

Twitter offers an audience of forward thinking consumers.  Commonly, Tweeple (Twitter people) are the ones talking up a new brand or shredding it to pieces.  Need proof?  See Bruno a One Day Wonder.  Search can be performed on Twitter to see who in your region is talking about you.  If they are happy with you, take the opportunity to build your brand more with them by engaging in a discussion about them, their needs, and desires.  If they’re not so happy with you, build unbreakable loyalty by taking this opportunity to hear them out and make it right.

LinkedIn offers a level of credibility and integrity. As of this writing, 80% of users are college educated/white collar workers and 8% are C level executives.  People searching for you can see who your contacts are and immediately judge whether or not it’s worth their time to connect with you.  The ability to receive (and give) recommendations let’s people who have found you get a taste of what clients, co-workers, employers, etc. think of you professionally.  Your peers can confirm you as an expert in your field by rating your answers to their questions.  The ability to join groups of like minded people gives you exposure to people you probably wouldn’t have an opportunity to meet.  Recently “Companies” has become an area where you may create a profile for your business.  In companies your profile may include a summary, who your current, past and new employees are as well as company news, stock information and your blog posts, plus much more.

Facebook is exponentially growing.  Now with 250 million users it’s becoming a top place for advertisers to market their products and services.  Facebook maintains an incredible amount of personal data, voluntarily submitted by it’s users.  Advertisers tap the data and filter the users to get an extermely relevant audience for their ads.  Often the CPC fees are below and estimated clicks are higher that those on Google.  Another benefit to utilizing Facebook is the ability to build a page for your business.  Pages offer Events, Discussions, Reviews, Photos, and almost anything else you can conceive.  The planning committee for my high school reunion created a page for our class and communicated primarily through wall posts to our classmates.  It’s a wonderful tool!

In summary, there are many uses to utilizing the top three social media outlets.  It takes time to evaluate which is right for your business, but you’ll find they all offer the ability to get closer to your consumers and build your relationships.  Check them out and give them a shot.

I have a creative mind.  I am surrounded by others with creative minds.  I was touched by one of these minds today in a blog post written on 7/14 by Anirudha Kurulkar.  Here is the link to his post: PPC & SEO Compared to Human Life

His story relates the importance of using negative keywords in PPC campaigns to appear in exactly the kind of search for which you want to be found.  Briefly, you ask God for a child, God gives you a beautiful child but the child is blind.  Well, you didn’t tell God you wanted a child with sight.  You got lucky he gave you one with legs, but why leave your results to luck.  Give search engines enough information to give you exactly what you want.  Negative keywords are an underutilized important part of all campaigns.  Use them and use them wisely.

With Google dominating the search engine market, Microsoft has decided to try and best Google at it’s own game, with “Bing”. Bing is what Microsoft likes to call a “decision engine” rather that a search engine; This is because Bing claims to be the most accurate search engine on the net, advertised that it gives you the results you want with nothing unrelated. I decided that before I could fully trust this, I needed to test it out. After my short time with Bing, I found that it did have a number of helpful features to get what you’re looking for faster. For example, hovering your mouse over the site displayed a short blurb of information about the site, including a summary of it’s contents. Bing doesn’t seem to be anything revolutionary, but it is efficient. The only question now is if it can actually beat Google.

Microsoft’s Game Plan

Microsoft is putting a lot of money into promoting Bing in various forms of media. This means that more people will be aware of it’s existence than any other new niche search engine. Because it is a Microsoft product, any computer that has the default internet explorer homepage and search engine will be forwarded to Bing. Traditionally this has lead to an older and less savvy audience, however with the mix of new and unseen features and large media push it could attract a larger and broader demographic than the previous Live.com had.

What Does That Mean For Us?

In the end we should pay close attention to Bing. Not only does it have potential to capture a large market share from Google, it also will have much better deals and pricing for pay per click as the demand for Bing adverting has not reached that of Google. There may be very qualified traffic searching Bing and it is a relatively open market place for advertising. It would be worth dedicating some time and money to test out a Bing search engine marketing campaign. With the metrics and measurement we can use today it would not take long to get a clear picture of the return on investment possible through the Bing search engine.

Beyond natural and paid search marketing you may also want to pay close attention to what features they are adding to their search. Like Google it seems they are planning to have enhanced results that include a variety of media. This may be Video, flight listings, products, images, etc… all of these areas are an opportunity to start a search campaign.

A common topic of discussion among AdWords users is how Google’s Quality Score effects ad performance. Google assigns quality scores as part of its effort to give users a more enjoyable experience.  A common misconception is that increasing the bid rate will increase the Quality Score.  This is not true.  Google has a complicated algorithm incorporating variables such as click through rate, history, landing page, and numerous other relevancy factors it uses to weed out irrelevant ads.  Someone may pay a higher click fee and see their ad rise in results, but it won’t last.  Google hits the pocketbook until you say “Uncle” and give up.  Optimizing a keyword, AdGroup, ad or landing page is the best way to improve the quality score and in turn lower click costs and improve your overall performance as a Google advertiser.

For more information visit Google’s AdWords Help.

While Google is extremely useful in listing ads relevant to a search query, LocalAdLink.com is exceptionally useful at getting relevant ads placed on it’s first page of results because of its geographic targeting capability.  Who on earth is LocalAdLink.com you ask?  Only the most aggressive Internet advertising platform to ever come along.

LocalAdLink.com is part of a trio of offerings from A Beyond Commerce Company who also holds BoomJ.com and i-Supply stores.  The theory behind what will make LocalAdLink.com successful is that the links from ads on BoomJ.com, i-Supply stores and the 200+ other search engines, web pages and social networking sites hosting LocalAdLink ads will drive an incredible volume of traffic to the site.

So far, so good!  Their growing popularity is pushing them up the internet rankings at breakneck speed. As of May 29, 2009 Alexa.com reports a traffic rank of 12,331 for LocalAdLink.com.  This is a jump of over 6500 from three months ago.  LocalAdLink on Alexa.  By the end of the year they anticipate being in the top 1000.  Not long after that they expect to reach the top 10.

Where did the idea of LocalAdLink.com originate?  In the mind of e-commerce poioneer Bob McNulty.  “…Bob McNulty founded HomeClub and the internet powerhouse www.Shopping.com. With thirty years of experience to draw upon, Mr. McNulty understands the needs of small businesses and the space they need to occupy in order to reach out to consumers.  Supported by a large and highly qualified team of professionals in multiple locations around the country, the combined efforts of BOOMj and LocalAdLink are about to revolutionize the way business is done online.” (taken from AboutTheCompany on www.LocalAdLink.com)

Let’s watch and see what happens!

Search Ad Marketing and LocalAdLink

Pay Per Click is becoming more and more well known as a cost effective and efficient way of advertising. A lot of companies that are just starting to venture into the pay per click space are experience great results, but could experience even more return on investment if they would use the proper analytics to “close the loop.”

Let me explain by outlining a common scenario:

• Company does research and keywords, and bids on them
• They see some traffic come in, and sales go up
• Happy to get more sales they increase their budget and bid on more keywords

At face value this seems like a great situation (and don’t get me wrong, it is.) After all, this is how advertising has worked since it’s conception. You have a general idea of how many people saw your message, hopefully sales go up and everyone is happy. However their are some key metrics missing that could help close the loop between advertising and return on investment.

What You Should Do

Rather than upping budgets and keywords it would be more effective to spend the time to figure out how to measure the success of the campaign beyond just click through rates and traffic. This is done by defining what your “conversion points” are and how much those conversions are worth.

What is a Conversion?

A conversion put simply is when a user completes an action that you would like them too. This could be purchasing a product, filling out a contact form, or signing up for a newsletter.

Once you have assigned a value to those actions (for example, I a lead from a contact form is worth $100) you can then use that data in your adwords campaign to see which keywords/campaigns/advertisements are actually successfuly developing leads for less than $100.

A Closed Loop Lets You Optimize

This information gives you real time measurement on how well your advertising is performing. Based on this data you can optimize your campaigns in several ways, including:

• Lowering the bids of keywords that are not converting in a profitable manor
• Removing keywords that are not converting at all
• Altering/removing advertisements that bring a lot of traffic (expensive) but don’t convert
• Find what keywords do convert, and use them to find similar keywords to bid on

Difficult, but Important

Sometimes this is harder than it sounds. For example, developing a value for actions that may not have a direct monetary amount tied to them. This is actually one of the more common problems that companies are faced with. However if you apply this same theory to these actions you can get a better idea of what each action is worth.

For example for every 10 people who sign up to our newsletter we get 1 client. Each client on average provides $500 worth of profit over 5 years. This would mean that the break even point of a newsletter signup would be $50. The lower you can make your cost per conversion beyond this point, the more profit you will make.

Google is undeniably a ubiquitous part of most of our lives. It is an official word in the Oxford English Dictionary. Additionally, more and more business transactions and dollars are done online and away from Traditional Media: Television, Radio, Print. As a business owner or director of marketing/advertising or a related role, more and more of Business/Marketing individuals must be educated on how to effectively reach the most amount of visitors/users to your website. The key is through Google. Google is a link to many different business websites to potential clients/visitors; who are ready to buy: Internet users already have an intent or need/want for a product of service & their first step is usually through Google.

The following will illustrate and explain the flow of internet traffic to a typical website. In this example we will use Mr. Widgeteer. The owner that sells and buys widgets:

Figure 1. Mr. Widgeteer effectively selects which type of traffic that goes into his website. He doesn’t sell square widgets so he doesn’t want that type of client. Therefore he doesn’t advertise there. On the other hand, he advertises Blue & Fast widgets because he’s most profitable and he continues to like that type of repeat client.

To a certain extent Google becomes the gatekeeper of who gets clients or visitors. As Google’s search engine market share is growing and growing, it holds and dictates the rules of doing business via Search Engine Marketing. One of those rules is to effectively execute your keyword research. You must do your keyword Research!

Why Must You Do Keyword Research? Resources!

Advertising or placement on irrelevant or nonessential keywords can be a waste of time, resources and money! In the aforementioned example, one sees Mr. Widgeteer only sells Blue & Fast widgets. If he’s not selling square widgets he shouldn’t advertise or show internet users. Top search engine placement on the square widgets page would mean lots clicks but none will provide you a return; because you can’t sell them widgets.

Keyword research is very important in finding and qualifying the type of clients/customers that you’re looking for. With the internet, people are overwhelmed with choices. Keyword research can provide business owners with insights on what most average internet users are looking for. Keyword research can provide a wealth of data and statistics about which terms are being searched most and which keywords are currently unmarked territory.

Without using keyword research would amount to selling product x without knowing what demand you’ll receive. A good expert will filter and refine keywords that will be a best fit for your business. Even if you do keyword research the top result may not be something that is a best fit in terms of execution and strategy.

Be sure you contact SAM and discover your Keyword Potential and unlock those new clients that you’ve been looking for.