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Back in the good old days, AdWords worked in a very basic way. The higher your bid per click, the higher your position. Simple. There are a lot of other PPC networks still operating on this model and that is one reason nobody can remember their names.

Two years ago (I think) when Google dragged it’s advertisers kicking and screaming into the new Quality based bidding system, the game completely changed. Google AdWords no longer operates on a “highest bid wins” system but on a rather confusing and sometimes illusive set of quality criteria.

Some people find it very difficult to get their heads around how this “quality” effects their bid prices and ultimately their ROI. Today, Google’s Chief Economist, Hal Varian has posted a fantastic video that simplifies the whole system and makes it easy for anyone to understand.

Easy to understand or what?

Now that you understand quality score a little better, realize how important it is to improve your quality score by increasing your click through rate and re-evaluating your landing page relevancy, what are you waiting for? Even if you increase your CTR by 0.01% a day over a month, that can be enough to bump your keywords quality score up and reduce your overall costs significantly.

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The AdWords content network has been the source of heartbreak and of joy for countless advertisers over the years. There are many opinions on the content targeting and placement targeting but the general consensus is that those new to AdWords should avoid it until they understand it fully. That is about to change. We were recently invited to participate in the new AdWords UI beta. Things have really changed a LOT and to be honest, I don’t really like it yet but there is one feature that really jumped out me as a game changer, the new “networks” tab. ..

Below you will find some screenshots of the new interface. Please note that I have removed any data that has identified the campaigns. These details are simply deleted and are indeed included in the interface. Please click images for full sized shots.

The new interface is a streamlined, ajaxified beast with a lot of new features. You’ll notice straight off the bat that the interface has been adjusted to look like Google analytics. In fact, the transition between AdWords and analytics is now seamless, complete with all the ajax progress animations. There is also an option to collapse the left sidebar (not shown) which includes a list of campaigns for easy access, similar to AdWords editor.

The one feature of note however is the new “networks” tab in each campaign. This tab lists the networks that your campaign is running on. Either search, search partners, content network and defined placements. The best part however is the content network automatic placements!

Previously, the only way to access this data was to through a tedious process of creating a placement performance report for the date range you wanted. Then you had to wade through the data with the awful pagination Google provides in it’s reports (what can we really do with 100 rows Google?). You also had to manually select your campaigns. Not any more.

Now you can see day by day metrics on each URL that your ads appear on the content network without running a placement performance report!

And that’s not the best part. With the new view, you can sort the columns in order of the metric of your choice, check the URLs that are performing to that metric and automatically add them to your placement campaigns! (Now called “Managed Placements” as seen).

To those of you who that were willing to put in the hard slog and suffer the sometimes agonizing wrath of the content network and placement campaigns you will realize how much of a fantastic new time saving feature this will be. This cuts out what can be hours of research time looking for decent performing placements.

The interface is still in very early beta. It errors out at least 2 times a session for me every time I have tried it. This has been a common complaint so I doubt it will be released any time soon.

Now, if Google could provide some cross segmentation options and integrate the bizarrely missing display ad builder tool, this will be an absolute hit. Great stuff Google!

Is anyone else as excited about this as I am?

Like this post? Why not share it instantly on twitter? Tweet This!

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In a previous post, I went through some ways you can use “strong” words in combination with strong call to action words to improve your PPC click through rate (CTR). Since that post, there have been some updates to the AdWords quality score algorithm and as such, CTR plays an ever important role. In fact, it is my opinion that incremental CTR increase is the most important part of any PPC marketing campaign as it is one of the few factors you can directly influence to increase your ad position and reduce your cost per click (CPC). Remember to always be A/B split testing your ads and never leave an adgroup with only a single ad.

Below, I outline five examples of ways you can increase your CTR without doing anything technical or magical. The ads are fabricated but the data is not. The ads are as close to the original as possible. Besides, you’re going to test the theory yourself anyway right?

1) Trademark Symbol/Registered Symbol.

While I have been using this method myself for years, Brad and Amber make some great points on this very topic. Not only can special symbols be used to increase your PPC CTR, but they can also be used to increase your organic SERP CTR. I could not agree with Ian Lurie more on his blog post predicting that organic CTR will matter a LOT in 2009.

2) Price In Headline

Adding the price in the headline is a great way to increase CTR. Be careful with this one though, if you’re not the cheapest, you’re CTR will suffer.

3) Seasonal Headlines.

Doesn’t matter if your product is not seasonal. If you sell blue widgets all year around, a headline like “Easter Widget Sale” will work great. There are so many different holidays, festivals and events that this can be used with. If you’re targeting locally, even better.

4) Trademark in Display URL Subdomain

While you can’t use most trademark terms in your ad copy, you can use them in your display URL.  Amber has a great post on why AdWords allows trademarks in the display URL here. Using the trademark in the display URL some argue confuses potential clickers into thinking that it is the “official” site of the trademark holder. Be careful with this one too… Google knows when a visitor clicks the back button on their browser!

5) The exact Keyword in the Headline.

An oldie, but a goodie. We all know that search engines BOLD your keywords when they match the search query. Having tightly knit adgroups will allow you to take advantage of this without having to use dynamic keyword insertion.

Remember, CTR for quality score reasons is only calculated on the exact match of the keyword and is only counted on the Google search network. This means that any increase in CTR from Dynamic Keyword Insertion does not improve your google quality score. CTR on Google search partners does not contribute to your quality score calculations.

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The time has come again. Irish SEOs, online marketers, webmasters, all members of the Irish Webmaster forum and anyone with an interest in all things web related are all welcome to come along to the second official IWF meetup.

The event will once again be hosted by the Harbour Master in the IFSC, Dublin on Saturday the 9th of August. I encourage everyone who can to attend as it is a great way to have a few drinks with people who don’t get annoyed at you for talking shop when socializing.

For the second time running, the event will be sponsored by the most fantastic webhosting company in Ireland, Blacknight Solutions who incidently are launching their new web hosting plans today and have also just exploded onto the scene with their new VPS hosting solutions (I plan to sample the finest champagne)

If you can make it we will be meeting at 7:30PM – 8:30PM. This is an open event and anyone can attend. The last event was great and I cannot tell you how much I got out of meeting everyone.

The confirmed attendees are as follows:

• Richard Hearne
• Dave Behan
• James Larkin
• Micky Wall
• Louie (You cannot miss him)
• Gavin Doolan
• Dave Davis
• James Farrell

The last time a LOT more than the confirmed list came along so please do join us.I might be there a little late so whoever gets there first, please get a table where we can all sit together! Looking forward to meeting some fresh faces and some… not so fresh. More details can be found here.

Those who are definitely coming along, let me know in the comments below and I’ll link you up above.

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First of all, happy new year to all our clients, friends, family members and business associates. I hope that 2009 will be as good for you as 2008 hopefully was.

It has been a little over 5 months since I last posted here on the RedFly blog. We have not dropped off the face of the planet. In fact, we have been doing some pretty great things that has left us with little time to do some of the fun stuff (like blogging). While neglecting to post over the past few months was a necessary evil, I am happy to say that normal blogging shall resume shortly.

We have a lot of fantastic things lined up this year along with the usual conference circuit. I myself will be attending SES London, SMW Dublin (Highly recommended), A4U Expo Amsterdam, eBay Devcon and various others toward the end of the year. If anyone would like to stop me for a chat there, please feel free!

I will also be trying to check out the first ever TeenCamp Ireland. While I am no longer a teen, I hope they wont mind me popping in for an hour or so. I think it is absolutely amazing that the Irish youth are so tuned in these days. Organized by and for teens, Teencamp is sure to be a fantastic day.

Finally, I would like to extend an invitation to any of our readers. If there is any topics that you would like us to cover this year, please feel free to get in touch and we’ll do our best.

All the best for 2009!

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One thing we have been helping more and more clients with recently is domain acquisition for conversions. We are by no means hard core domain investors and our experience of the domain industry is intermediate at best. However, one of the often overlooked benefits of PPC marketing is the conversion data from the different sources the networks use…

For this example, we’ll use the trusted Google Content Network. For those unfamiliar, Google allows you to advertise using Adwords on three different “networks”. These are “categories” are the Google Search Network, which AdWords advertisers will be most familiar, The Search Partners Network which includes AOL and various other “trusted sources” and the Google Content Network which consists of hundreds of thousands of websites and domains running Google AdSense. For the sake of simplicity, I am leaving out print, audio and TV. What we will be focusing today is the Google Content Network.

Many advertisers either fail to consider buying additional domains to compliment their main one or don’t want the trouble of researching the value of the domain. With the Google Content Network, this is already being done for you behind the scenes.

The content network is, by default, run on all sources. This includes a plethora of relevant publisher websites as well as social networks, video portals and parked domains. We want to take a closer look at the latter.

It should be noted that Google give options to exclude most of these sources from within the AdWords console.

Assuming you are advertising on the content network and have your conversion tracking set up (you do have it set up don’t you?) you can use a rarely spoken about AdWords report called the “Placement Performance Report”. This report gives you insight into how your ads are performing on the different sources and gets as granular as the domain and URL of where your ad was served from.

When you run this particular report, you can choose to report and view on a variety of metrics. For the purpose of this post, we will only be looking at the domain, URL impressions, clicks, conversions and Value/Cost (Return On AdWords Ad Spend).

Below you will see an actual report run for one of our clients. As you can see, we have sorted the list by ascending conversion data. This is a report for ONE WEEK. Starting to see where I am going with this? For this particular client, the value for each conversion is between $97 and $227 so you can clearly see that the content network is working for them.

Great! We can see the content network is working well for this client. We can leave it running right? Well… let’s just take a look at what’s actually on “parked domain 1″. When we navigate to the site, we see a typical SEDO landing page with content network ads prominently displayed. We can also see the clients ad running in position #3. However, as with most/many SEDO landing pages that are only monetized through advertising while they are waiting to be sold, in the left column there is an offer to “Buy this domain“.

So this domain is for sale eh? If this domain is generating an average of six conversions per week for this client and it’s getting a lot of type in traffic, it must be worth something. Even sharing this domain with ten advertisers using AdWords, the value to this particular client is on the bottom end is $762 ($127 x 6) per week or $39624 per year! (assuming traffic is maintained AND that the client is still sharing with the other advertisers). We might be on to something. Clicking on the “More Details” link to buy the domain brings us to the following page:

So here we have a domain that’s generating $762 a week gross revenue and it’s for sale for $500? Do I need to tell you what happened next?

We advised the client and they purchased the domain the day of this report. Because we know which landing page was generating the conversions from this domain, the client simply did a 301 redirect to the landing page and let me tell you, they are reaping the rewards. They are getting an even higher than expected return because now they are not paying for the clicks to their site and are not sharing the page with 9 other competitors! Since the beginning of the year, they have purchased over 30 domains using this method.

Buying these domains that have type in traffic and that you KNOW convert (from your AdWords conversion data) offer a significant long term return on investment. So what are you waiting for? Go run your placement performance reports and see what money you are leaving on the domain table today! (before your competitors read this)

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In the world of search engine optimisation, few names are more recognizable than that of the man who literally wrote the book on the subject. Today I had the pleasure of asking some burning SEO related questions I had for Mr. Aaron Wall.

Aaron is considered an industry veteran and the “go to guy” for all things SEO related.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your site SEO book ?

I have been doing SEO for about 5 years now, and work about 6.5 days a week. My wonderful wife and I just had our first anniversary.

SEO Book was born as a blog covering SEO, and has morphed into a site which is more about search and online marketing in general, which offers a popular suite of tools and a training program.

Can you tell us how much of a difference switching from the ebook model to the online training model has worked out well for you and what was the one thing that tipped you into moving?

I think we easily have the best SEO community on the web. The pricepoint has simply filtered out the noise common at most SEO forums while lively conversation occurs daily. The one big flaw with the current model is that the members and I spend so much time inside the forums that little time is spent externally on marketing to bring new people in, so growth has not been fast but I would rather go for quality than size any day of the week.

I was an unhappy person with the old business model. It required me to answer questions for people who valued my time at $0, which lead to me having too many customers when we reached around the 13,000 mark. Plus as some of the sleazy email list spammer hype driven internet marketers started hyping SEO it lowered lead quality at the lower end, which was where my business model was situated. A business model that is scalable with 10,000 customers with less than 1% of the customer interactions not going well becomes simply unsustainable when it grows to 13,000 with 5% of the customers being not customers well aligned with your brand and strategy. I was doing so much email that I started to easily become rude and frustrated.

Many customers have told me that I made their business careers and made them millionaires, but as search grew more complex the market for people wanting honest advice moved beyond the $79 pricepoint the old business operated at. Ultimately I was serving the wrong market and lowering the percieved value of my product by being available so cheaply, even while competitors selling information products at 50x or 100x the price of mine were asking for the latest copy of my ebook before making their next info product, and lifting lines from my work and integrating it into their work.

The other thing that happened was that my sites that were 5% of my time started to become the majority of my income. It does not make sense to spend most your time on a job that does not make much money, especially if it is no longer enjoyable. And so changing the business model of SEO Book allows me to enjoy it again, while increasing the value to customers and not drastically lowering its revenues or drastically increasing the amount of time needed to maintain it.

Google is all over the place right now and it is looking like a lot of factors that once held weight no longer do and vice versa. What do you make of the current state of flux? Where do you see Google applying more weight?

I see a lot of people talking about localization becoming a more important topic. Google is placing a lot of weight on exact match domain names, and their current reliance on domain authority is springing up a bunch of general websites like eHow, Mahalo, Squidoo, etc.

The big thing to really look out for is arbitrary hand edits. If your site does not look good it might get edited out of the search results even if you offer the highest quality information in your space.

How effective do you think buying established websites is to SEO leaving the branding, customer base and community factors out?

Buying old sites based on their link equity is amazingly profitable. The key is to not be too drastic or spammy with the changes you make such that you can get many years of cashflow out of such a site.

Do you think that there are any on or off page white hat techniques that if over used (Think over use of the nofollow attribute, borderline excessive internal linking etc.) may trigger a flag at Google? Do you believe there is such a thing as an over optimization flag?

Sure. I think many people repeate keyword phrases more than is optimal, and some of my pages have got automatically filtered out for being too well aligned with a keyword. The key when that happens is to lower the keyword prominence and repetition – make sure there is some variance between your page title, inbound anchor text, and how you are using the keywords in page content.

Why do you think so many webmasters spend so much time and money *cough* on buying links when the cost of developing content that attracts higher quality editorial links is far less?

Man is inherantly lazy. Editorial links in many markets require building a brand and social interaction. That can be a slow and low ROI path that looks like there is no light at the end of the tunnel, especially if you are new to the social aspects of the web and do not have any experience with blogs and the like.

You offer a great Google Global Firefox extension and we have a suite of well linked to SEO tools. For you and I it is cheaper to create content that builds free links, but for most people on the web the ROI of such an experiment is not as obvious until after they experience it.

Also worth noting that at the corporate end there is also less risk to buying links, and many more people and hurdles in between the creation of a good idea and the finished product.

For those who say that SEO is “Bullshit” and that correctly designed, semantically sound design is all that is needed to rank higher than your competition, what do you say to them?

I made a site to prove them wrong. A semantically sound site that gets no search traffic, and gave it the name dollarseo.com. Please give it a look and laugh, but please do not link at it though or it will mess up the test.

What do you say to the same group who think that SEO should not be a dedicated profession?

A non-trivial portion of the business world is driven by arbitrage. Some industries have licenses that require people to jump through hoops before they can profit in them, but many of the best things to arbitrage are new fields where guidelines are not fully established and the market is not well informed.

It does not matter that some people do not like the field of SEO. If done well it is both highly profitable and highly effective. If you pick the right products and clients it is one of the rare opportunities where you can help ensure that everyone wins.

Having said all of the above, SEO is becoming much more complex, and is becoming a subset of marketing. In some industries it requires the use of public relations, in others it requires the act of smart publishing, and yet in others it comes down to ad buying. Any single strategy can get you to the top for some keywords, but the more tools you have the greater the likelihood you can compete across many different keywords and categories.

From a client perspective I think if you sell SEO services it might be helpful to bundle them with PPC services. People looking for a consultant on PPC are looking for cost savings where they are already spending money. Whereas many people looking for SEO are looking for free traffic. This was one of the reasons why I thought my wife had a good idea in launching PPC Blog. Rather than catering to a market saturated with free misinformation with prospective clients wanting everything for free it caters to an audience looking to spend money.

Do you have any tips on ranking country specific domains/sites in multiple locations. For example, if I have www.mysite.ie and want to target the US, UK and Ireland? What approach would you take if starting from scratch and what approach would you take with an established site?

I have nowhere near the international experience that some great SEOs like you from across the pond, but if I was on a limited budget I would set my main market on the main domain name and use subdomains for other markets. If I were using one main domain I would try to build from the .com. I would also try to secure the other names in case I later wanted to change my strategy.

If I had more budget and knew I would market all the sites then I would get 3 domain names (1 for each region) and host each of them in their matching location.

In the coming years, what SEO techniques do you predict are going to become more/most popular with dedicated hard working SEOs?

I think SEO is really going to become more and more about public relations and social interaction. Today I read a post by a web designer talking about how you should aim for a 2% keyword density. He was no SEO expert, but because he was a popular web designer his post got hundreds of comments and many inbound links.

It is not what you know but who you know. What communities do you want links from? How can you integrate yourself and your business in them?

In your experience, what has been the TYPE of link that has been most worth your time acquiring?

Links that come as endorsements from trusted members of your community help with rankings, pay directly through sales and referals, and are hard for competitors to replicate. They pay 3 different ways and lead to additional links, plus they are beyond the reach of most competitors. Those are the links I really love.

Finally, how do you think the search industry, SEO in particular can move away from the “cowboy”, “get rich quick” and “snake oil” labels that so many low quality providers have caused all SEOs to be tarred with the same brush by default?

I think the only way this would be possible is if we made a group effort to highlight the sleasy stuff that Google markets in their paid ads and help rebrand their service such that we introduced opportunity cost to them for them trying to trash us. But it would need to be well organized to succeed, but from what I have seen most well known people in the SEO space are looking out for themselves, so I don’t think we would have any chance unless we decide to use a different label.

Many of the smartest and most successful SEOs have moved out of the SEO industry and are now web publishers building online brands for themselves. If you do great SEOs for others then eventually building your own sites and brands is a must from a profitability, income diversity, and a credibility standpoint. I still love the SEO field, but realize that it is not the path toward highest earnings for most as a service based model.

So there you have it. I hope some of those answers were as helpful and enlightening to you as they were to me. If anyone is on the fence about learning the ropes of SEO, I encourage you to check out the SEO training offered by Aaron. It’s worth every penny. Also, consider reading and subscribing to his SEO Blog and his new pay per click marketing blog.

I’d like to thank Aaron Wall for taking the time to do this interview and I look forward to meeting him at PubCon this year in Las Vegas.

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There’s a lot of buzz in the online PR world about social networking, whether that be traditional social networks like Myspace and Facebook or social networking through microblogging services such as Twitter.

Should you jump into social networking to promote your business? And if so, with so many options available, how do you choose which social networks to participate in?

Benefits of Social Networking

I’m not much of a supporter of diving into every new or large social networking environment or fad to promote a business. However, social networks do have some benefits that make them worth considering as an addition to your online PR efforts:

1. Social networks and microblogging services can serve multiple roles with a single tool. For example, you can network with colleagues, while also promoting offers or information to clients and potential clients of your company.

2. Social networking is cost-effective. Most networks are free to join.

3. Social networks and microblogging services can help you get news or a message out very quickly to a targeted audience.

Problems with Social Networking

Despite its benefits, there are also some drawbacks to social networking for promoting a business.

1. Social networking can be a productivity killer. Many businesses simply try to do too much – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc. The multiple updates aren’t always reaching different audiences, and it’s a waste of time that could be spent elsewhere if you’re simply targeting the same groups with the same messages, but in different locations.

2. It’s easy to get too personal, or too off-topic, when social networking, Twittering, etc. You may divulge more information than you wanted to (or than you should), and once you’ve said it, you can’t take it back. The instant gratification factor also makes it easier to communicate without thinking things through; contributing to negative “Web wars” at times.

3. The bulk of the population still hasn’t embraced these technologies, meaning your target audiences may not yet be well-represented there.

Choosing Social Networking Services for Your Needs

There are good things about social networking for PR. There are negative things as well. So how can you strike a happy balance? How do you choose the best social media communication tools for your business, without over-extending your resources to reach only a small portion of your audience?

1. Target, target, target! It doesn’t matter what the largest social network is if your specific audience isn’t represented there. Niche social networking tools may be a far better option than simply going with networks that always seem to be getting the buzz. For example, no network yet beats Myspace for promoting to musicians. If you’re trying to reach an adult audience as opposed to teens, you may be better off using a service like Gather.com. If you want to network with other professionals in your industry, LinkedIn might serve your needs more effectively. There are also smaller social networks targeted to very specific niches (webmasters, photographers, etc.). There’s no reason to try to “do it all.”

2. Understand the numbers. Don’t join a social network simply because they say they have X number of members. Those numbers mean absolutely nothing. What you should care about is not the total membership, but instead the “active” membership (and those specifically within your target audience – it goes back to targeting).

3. Get to know a network’s policies on promotion, as it applies to your plans. The last thing you want is to be labeled a spammer. Understand that these tools are more about networking, building relationships, and communicating than blatant promotion, as in marketing and sales.

No matter how deep you decide to delve into social networking and / or microblogging, always make sure you’re making the best use of your time, and reaching your intended targets.

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Today, Google announced that it would be holding a website optimizer competition where you can win a partnership with a website optimizer to improve your sites ROI. The “webSite workout” competition is open only to those in the US (What’s new?) as advertisers outside the great United States don’t really spend that much on advertising.

Anyway, for those of you who use the Google Website Optimizer and for those of you considering using it for this competition, there are some unpublished problems with the tool that you should be aware of. From a very trusted source who wishes to remain anonymous:

As you have seen from my CC’d emails to youI have been having a battle with Google regarding the web page optimizer and data discrepancies. Until recently they just denied the problem was on their end.

I can now share two things with you that are very important moving forward when implementing WEB OPTIMIZER:

• 1. When entering the URLs of the test pages be very careful not to paste a blank space in at the end of the URL. It is almost impossible to check once the URL is entered and totally screws up optimizer reports.
• 2. Be aware that there is an issue that Google has tried to hide.The Web Optimizer (WO) code can conflict with the Google Analytics (ga) code. The work around is discussed below.

The following was the eventual reply/workaround from Google:

We suspect that you are seeing conversion discrepancies because your conversion page contains instances of ga.js and urchin.js for Analytics and Website Optimizer, respectively. Having both codes on one page can cause reporting issues. To smooth out the discrepancy, please modify the ga.js code for use with WO, rather than adding a call to urchin.js as well.

Please have a look at the following article:
http://www.google.com/support/websiteoptimizer/bin/answer.py?answer=77075

Option 2 will soon be phased out soon, so please only focus on Option 1, which details how to update your Analytics ga.js code to run for WO as well. Hopefully this is straightforward and corrects the issue. Keep in mind that we’ll have to focus on data from the date of the code correction going forward…

To those of you using Google Website Optimizer and are noticing anything strange, double check everything above. I know this is a little off the general topic of this blog but the issue has been a constant source of headaches and inaccurate reporting for months now.

* Source and Google rep names have been removed.

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For those of you who are not advertising on facebook already (and even if you are) and want to give it a try, now there is a completely free way to test the waters.

As part of the Visa Business promotion, Visa are offering $100 USD in advertising credit to facebook users/advertisers. To get the free credit all you need to do is…

Log into facebook and add the Visa Business Network App. Once added, Facebook will send you a coupon code with instructions on how to add the credit to your account.

Perfect if you want to test the waters on facebook and perfect if you’re already spending a fortune with them. There’s more to PPC than just the big three

Seems like Alexia was WAY ahead of me finding this. Also, Master Mulley is running a competition for the best stats on a facebook campaign. Have a look!

UPDATE *** I just received an email from Visa letting me know that this offer has now expired.

Thank you for promoting the Visa Business Network’s $100 Facebook ad credit on your blog –we appreciate your support!  The ad credit program was very successful and I wanted to let you know that it has come to an end as of March 18th (the free Ad Credits was a promotion for the first 20,000 activations by small business owners).

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