inhousesem.com

I’ve been a podcasting fool lately, check out the latest SEMcast on Google’s trademark policy change and 5 things I learned at SMX Advanced. Then I also special guest starred in two podcasts for Affiliate ABC’s with Deborah Loxly. One is on creatives for promoting travel and the other discusses the recent Amazon and eBay changes in their direct to merchant ppc rules.

As a reminder you can send me questions via twitter, a blog comment or a youtube video and I’ll answer them in a future podcast. I also accept questions via telegram (singing only) or carrier pigeon.

Tip of My Hat affiliate marketing podcast, search engine marketing podcast

I was at SMX Advanced last week and spent some time reviewing my notes and take aways from the sessions in the hopes of formulating some sort of coherent to-do list for myself. I noticed a couple of things I learned, so I thought I would share:

1. Google’s search query report just got more useful. Many less “other unique queries” and more actual queries exposed. I checked this one out myself, and its true, so thanks Google for making that better!

2. Only 5% of internet users time is spent searching, the other 95% is spent doing other things on the web. Fascinating. See, I told you content targeting was a good idea.

3. No one seems excited about bid management tools. One session has presenters explicitly talked about ways to calculate for yourself what your ideal bid should be and most people I talked to either weren’t using a system or didn’t think it was worth the money. Also with quality score’s ability to enormously impact bids, most marketers thought that was more important to optimize quality score than finely monitoring the bid itself.

4. Quality score is super important. There was a whole session on quality score and how important it is at the account, ad, keyword and landing page levels. Also general advice was given that if you have keywords with a score below 5, you should consider removing them or at least moving them to alleviate possible tainting. I knew it was important, but this really made me think much more about it.

5. Mobile is still early days. The mobile session presenters were great, but my big takeaway was that unless you’ve got a super perfect for mobile product (like a ringtone, or iphone app), then its still really early days for you to gain mobile adopters. The volume isn’t there yet.

Thanks to everyone who gave their time and expertise to making the sessions and roundtable discussions so worthwhile! I had a great time speaking and meeting lots of other search engine marketers.

Industry, Speaking Engagements search engine marketing education, smx advanced

Check out the official word on the Google Adwords trademark policy change here.

Basically if a site sells a brand name, or has information on it, its fair game to use the trademark in the ad text. This is a pretty huge change that I am sure many trademark protective brands, especially ones that sell through multiple online distribution channels, will not like. For example, its now fair game for a hotel aggregator like Expedia to bid on and display in their ad text a brand name, like Hilton hotels.

I think it is a smart move for Google to get out of arbitrating trademark issues as much as possible. Though big brand advertisers will be irritated with them, they’ve washed their hands of being the middle man. Now all those brands will have to hash out agreements with their distribution channels, which they probably should have done anyway. And of course their lawyers will have many threatening letters to send. And its likely Google will increase revenues with this move, CTRs for ads that now can use the brand name are sure to rise.

It never made sense that an advertiser could bid on a brand name keyword, but couldn’t display it in the ad text. How exactly can you say you offer Segway tours without using the word Segway? In some cases like that one, its just impossible.

Industry brand names in search, google trademark policy change

I spend more waking hours on a weekday with Excel than I do my husband. Seriously. Eight or nine hours a day, compared to five-ish. I’ve had dreams about Excel. Which is all just to say, I use Excel a lot. Excel is a super useful tool to help manage paid search accounts, so I thought I’d share my favorite Excel ppc tips.

Math. This is basic, but you can do math in Excel. You should never have Excel and a calculator program open at the same time. You can straight up just type formulas into the cell (ie, 4*5) or refer to cells (A1*B2).
VLOOKUP. A super handy Excel formula. Let’s say you have a list of keywords you can add to your account, but you don’t want to add ones you already have. If you download your account keywords into Excel you can VLOOKUP keywords to add in your account keywords list to see if they are there and if they are (for the formula, return a value of the keyword if its in the list), you can skip them. Also good for marrying up separate reports with a shared element. For example, you might have a report of adgroups with clicks and costs and another report of adgroups with revenue and transactions. Since they both have adgroups, you can VLOOKUP the adgroup name and return the values for revenue and transactions in the click/cost report, making one nice report.
CONCATENATE. Another handy formula. Let’s say you have a list of keywords and you want to add the word “discount” to all of them to add to your account. CONCATENATE “discount” + a space + the cell of the keyword and magically you get “discount keyword”. Just drag the formula down and the list is created. Or likewise if you have brand names + product types permutations you can work through all those quickly with concatenate.
Filtering. Sometimes you have a huge list of keywords that you want to prioritize, maybe adding ones about cruises are higher value for you. Using the filters in Excel you can filter a list of keywords to show any that “contain” cruise. Also handy for answering questions like, how many keywords about Sony do we have?

I know its hard to grasp how to use these formulas by just reading this, definitely check out Excel help for more information! Also practice really helps. These tips and more are covered in SEMcast #7, now available on geekcast.fm.

Tip of My Hat excel ppc tips, excel sem, managing search engine marketing with excel

We’re hiring a product sales coordinator, if you’re interested, email me: kelly[at]viator.com. I think the position can be based out of San Francisco or Las Vegas. I always think the Product Team gets to do all the fun stuff, here’s a chance to join them!

Position Title: Product Sales Coordinator

Salary: Base plus bonus

Reports to: Product Sales Manager

Viator is the leading online provider of tours, activities and attraction – in 450 cities around the world. Over the last five years, Viator has built extensive supplier and distribution relationships as an advanced technology platform. Our market-leading selection of products includes 5,000 tours and attractions in 75 countries. This key role assists the Product Sales Manager in managing supplier relationships and is responsible for the effective and timely administration of product management.

Primary Responsibilities:

· Strategic development of the assigned market

· Ownership and accountability for performance of market with regards to sales, margin, inventory, participation, and rates

· Work with Product Sales Manager and VP of Product Sales on developing account strategies, analysis, and reports

· Proactively manage product content and delivery, building a profitable product range and ensure the quality and integrity of all products (description, pricing, availability)

· Writing and editing effective copy that is optimized for search engines

· Work closely with Marketing; delivering analytical assessment to maximize destination & supplier revenue as well as contributing to marketing and merchandizing programs

· Be an organizational ‘thought leader’ in assigned markets, contributing destination and supplier insights

· Support Product Sales Manager on key account sales calls

· Point of contact for selected suppliers in relation to the contracting and delivery of products

· Accurate delivery of product information into VCS database, online tools, and internal servers

· Administration of supplier product material

· Maintenance of existing product – text/tariffs/images

· Ideas for continual improvement of all database systems and work methods

· Conduct analysis to ensure product pricing is competitive in the market place

· Research into new supplier opportunities and marketplaces

Required Skill’s:

• Strong analytical, communication, organizational, interpersonal and negotiation skills
• 2+ years in product management and marketing experience
• Demonstrated business experience, online preferred
• Travel industry experience strongly desired
• Excellent communication and time management skills
• Solid understanding of internet search engines

Career Path:

Consistent success in the achievement of goals may result in the promotion to Product Sales Manager

Uncategorized

Paige is my 13-year-old cat, and sometimes she likes to check up on my account stats.

She is in your account, makin’ bid changes. Happy Friday!

I Love the Interweb adwords, lolcat

Just got the news I’ll be speaking at SMX Advanced for the Proving and Improving ROI in Paid Search session - Day 2 (June 3) at 3:00-4.15. Come say hi and hopefully learn something about improving your paid SEM ROI!

I’m very interested in checking out the mobile paid search session and amazing ppc tactics (go on, amaze me!). And I’ll probably attend some of the social media track as well.

I’ll likely do a rundown of interesting tidbits and insights on SEMcast, the in-house search engine marketing podcast I host on geekcast.fm, but I probably won’t live blog the sessions.

Hope to see you there!

Speaking Engagements, Tip of My Hat paid search roi, smx advanced

SEMcast #6 is up on geekcast.fm, or if you subscribe to the feed in iTunes or another software you’ll see it appear. Today’s podcast is all about the dilemma of inheriting a paid search account. The podcast addresses how to restructure and mitigate risk.

In other news, Viator launched their German language site, so willkommen to it. Do I speak German? Nein. Do I run German language ppc campaigns for the site? Ja! How is this miracle achieved? Check out SEMcast #4 and learn best practices for non-English campaigns.

Lastly, have you tried the new Google AdWords interface? Get a preview and provide feedback on the AdWords interface changes.

Industry, Tip of My Hat new adwords design, new adwords interface, paid search engine marketing, semcast, viator.de

SEMcast #5 is live. This time I am joined by super special guest star Matt Nichols who I used to work with at Hotwire. He manages search engine marketing for Pandora, which seems to be everyone’s favorite internet radio service. We chat about Matt’s insights on SEM best practices at Pandora, thoughts on whether to manage search engine marketing in-house versus an agency, and why Pandora has taken a hiatus from paid search engine marketing.

Tip of My Hat

Today is a Monday and some Mondays I just want things to be new.  So today, a new WordPress theme, thanks to inove.

Also, there’s a new Viator.com shore excursions site, and yep, I added new search engine marketing for it today too.

I forgot to mention last week SEMcast #4 is available, hear all about best practices for non-English search engine marketing campaigns.

And its only 2 pm, I think I can make a bunch of new adgroups in French today and that should do it. Yay for new Monday stuff!

Tip of My Hat french adgroups, inove theme, search engine marketing, viator shore excursions site