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As you might have seen I crossed the pond to speak at SMX London earlier this month. From talking to several UK SEOs there seems to be an impression that SMX is for more advanced search marketers, which probably explains why the boot camp track was sort of empty and the more advanced sessions packed full. The Fundamentals of Search Advertising panel was truly international consisting of me (USA! USA!), Ophir Cohen (Israel), Alan K’necht (Canada) and Richard Gregory (UK). Everybody had something a little bit different to say, but I think all the thoughts were very complimentary and I hope the audience learned a lot.

Most of the sessions I attended were fairly worthwhile, though I think it is worth noting that if you are going to attend just one search marketing event, SMX West is really where its at. SMX West is much, much bigger and more well attended and a better opportunity for networking. Also I think SMX West topics are more advanced and cutting edge. That said, I did learn things from SMX London and meet some new folks, so it was certainly worth the time.

One trend I noticed in presentations (and maybe it was just the sessions I was in) is that there’s a tendency to talk a lot about bad marketing tactics, and to do so at such a length that less time is actually spent on good ones and best practices, which I find much more actionable and useful. Telling me what not to do doesn’t really help me do anything (just helps me not do things). I concede that knowing where to draw the line is good and learning from mistakes is important, but I’d prefer to see more than half the content be about success than failure. In particular I found the Integrating Search and Display session to mainly focus on bad examples and very few actual best practices.

Enough on my opinion, I filled out my feedback form! See you all at SMX West in a few months.

Google released an SEO guide today - huzzah! While the SEO guide is very basic, it does have really good advice for novices to SEO and will hopefully serve as a great primer for folks getting started with their SEO efforts. Basic, almost common sense advice about meta tags, anchor text, site maps and content is the bulk of the guide. Kudos to Google for the clear and concise explanations and for finally giving some basic advice to the little guys who need help the most.

Get the Google SEO guide here.

Am I getting political for a moment? Maybe. Bear with me.

The FCC will soon vote on freeing up white space spectrum, essentially bandwidth that we could all use for better broadband access, but the broadcasting lobby would prefer not to see that happen. This reminds me a lot of cable tv back in the day - we could be living in a world where we pay just for channels we want on an ala carte basis, or from several providers, but we don’t have that choice because of laws made hastily and foolishly in the past. Don’t let that happen with internet access.

Bring wireless Internet to everyone, everywhere.

Sign the petition.

Want more info? Check out Google’s blog post on the white space spectrum vote.

If you’re marketing to pretty much the entire world (or even just a few countries), Google’s new geographic report is so interesting on many levels. Depending on your level of conversion reporting, it can be a powerful new optimization tool. Just last week I deselected all the countries that haven’t generated sales and have significant costs, an easy win. Another fun exercise was to compare click-through rates and traffic percentages for some of our major markets. I wish the report showed a summary versus a daily total for a time period, but for the moment I am living with it.

There was only one major gaffe I sent along to Google, apparently my ads were showing in places that I had assumed could not be targeted (meaning they aren’t listed as countries on Google’s targeting list). The report detailed traffic from ads appearing and receiving clicks from places like Cuba and Sudan, which for several legal reasons is not good. When I sent along the report, it was universally acknowledged as not good, so I am sure the problem is being fixed.

In the meantime its easy to fix in Google’s campaign targeting. Instead of selecting all, just select the whole list of countries (or whichever ones you want). I think its the all option that is causing the issues, since I ceased targeting to all the problem has vanished.

Attending SMX London? I”ll be speaking at SMX London, here’s my session:

Fundamentals of Search Advertising
Day 1, Nov 4th 1-2.15 pm

I think that the other speakers will likely be covering how to get started creating a good campaign structure and other basic best practices.

I plan to complement the just getting started presentations with a presentation on how to do an initial account optimization. I”ll feature specific information about which reports to run, how to cut costs and identify where more investment will increase sales, as well as tools and features provided by the search engines to block sites, ips, etc.

So drop by and say hi, I would love to meet you!

I am down under in Sydney this week - meetings, planning, scheming for the future!

Meanwhile check out this very concise, but still excellent, article about click fraud from MarketingSherpa. I actually think its more realistic and less panicky than other articles and it gives sound advice on how to get started monitoring click fraud.

I’ve had good success with taking note of aberrations of traffic that are shady and getting refunds. Just make sure you have the data to back up your fraud based refund request. I sort of think of it as needing the receipt to return something you bought, but didn’t want or that didn’t work.

Recently Viator launched a test to do a little European market sizing and also to see how much effort is involved in translating our site content. We set up four mini sites with a small amount of translated Viator.com content in the most popular European languages.

You can check them out here:

French Viator site

Spanish Viator site

German Viator site

Italian Viator site

So naturally once you have sites you need traffic. On the unpaid side we’ve were spidered and indexed surprisingly quickly and traffic is picking up nicely, though we are still working out some language kinks as we test. Getting consistent in our translation decisions (and committing to making them) is the biggest challenge so far, but things are going pretty well.

On the paid side this has been an exciting project! Anyone who’ done search engine marketing for a long time experiences burn out. A lot of the optimization and maintenance associated with doing good paid search engine marketing management are boring and repetitive. Running reports, changing bids and adding keywords are all important, but by year three (or even two) start to get old. So this is fun actually, though I am doing the same tasks, the keywords and ads are now all French, German, Spanish and Italian which somehow spices it up.

I’ve taken many years of Spanish, but the other languages I am fairly clueless about (I maybe know 20 words in French). You’d think this is a stumbling block, but actually it matters very little. When I went to set up the campaigns I pulled from AdWords Editor all the relevant English account information (keywords, ads, etc) and sent it to our account manager. I asked our account manager to coordinate translation by Google’s optimizers, and they’ve been working along at a nice pace churning out the translated campaigns. The translations have generally been of a very high quality and the ads all have strong click-through rates. I review the campaigns using Google Translate or Babelfish to clarify anything I can’t extrapolate the meaning of, but I get the gist of a surprising amount of the ad text and keywords - go Latinate languages! Also travel has quite a lot of cognates, so the words are fairly similar to English in many cases. Its also been nice to bounce some questions off the Google optimizers (like should we translate proper nouns like city names?) as they add an additional perspective to our translation team.

Running reports and adjusting bids is just the same as ever, you don’t really need to know what something means. Often I run a natural search report to find new keywords to add, and this is just the same for non-English, but I sometimes have to translate keywords I’m not sure about. Often I recognize them based on other keywords in an adgroup so I know where in our account they should go without having to translate. I err on the side of caution translation wise, when in doubt I do it, I would hate to miss-assign keywords or add something really too general or accidentally off topic to the account.

So while it may seem daunting to run search campaigns in a language you’re not conversant in, its actually not too bad in practice. Once we expand these sites as core parts of Viator’s business we’ll dedicate more language proficient resources to their marketing, but as a scrappy test this is going better than I expected. I definitely encourage testing non-English keywords, given the strength of the Euro, you may be able to tap into a healthy European customer base that boosts business growth.

One question I have, that I’m not currently testing, is non-English keywords linking to English content (with or without translated ad text). I’m curious, does this produce incremental performance? Or is there too much of a disconnect in language between ad/keyword and landing page for it to be successful? I’d love to hear from marketers who’ve tested this!

[As an aside, yes, sorry, I know I haven't really posted in awhile, blame work!]

I was telling my boss the other day that I was going to spend some time adding new keywords to our paid search accounts. I’ve been doing that for nigh on three years now, and we’re hitting the 65K keyword mark, so quite reasonably she asked where the heck am I getting more keywords from? And is it worth my time?

There are lots of ways to get new keywords, but I am but one person with limited time, so really I want to focus on adding higher value keywords, ones that I am sure are worth the time and effort (or at least a test).

Here’s my top 5 places to find new keywords:

1. Paid Search Analytics Reports:

Whether you run Omniture (like I do) or Google Analytics or something else, you likely have a search report available that will show all the paid search keywords and their revenue (not a campaign one where you’ve specified the keyword, but one similar to the unpaid search report). In that report you’ll be able to see all the paid search keywords generating revenue that you may not have specified for purchase. Broad match in Google and Yahoo has gotten very broad indeed and you’ll likely dig up a ton of keywords that aren’t in your account, but should be.

One might think, if these are in the paid search report, then I don’t need to add them, we’re covered. For the moment that’s true, but with the vagaries of competition and the ever changing search side algorithms, I think its good to actually add these keywords to your account. Then you guarantee their continued performance, and can better specify a bid for them commensurate with their value. Leaving it up to broad match may inadvertently have you over or under bidding for the term, and if it falls off the radar somehow you’re unlikely to see that keyword is a cause of performance declines (or improvements).

2. Natural Search Analytics Reports:

Even better is to run the same report as above, but for natural search keywords that are revenue generators. Natural search captures something like 60-75% of the clicks versus paid, which is great, but still are you going to let that paid 25-40% go just because you’re doing well with a keyword in natural? Add these keywords, I guarantee your competition will. Never in my experience has it been cannibalizing to add paid where natural is doing well, and anecdotally I’ve heard that having both paid and natural in strong positions has greater brand impact and lifts performance overall for both channels.

3. Google’s Search Query Report:

Less good but still useful, because in my case I’m not tracking revenue through Google, is to run Google’s search query report. If you are running Google revenue tracking then this is just like #1 for you. In my case, its nice to see all the queries matching broadly and to add good keywords or add negative matching for bad keywords.

4. Internal Search Reports:

Mine your company’s search logs for their site search. We’ve got a search box on Viator.com and log all the searches and revenue associated with those searches. I regularly run reports for revenue generating internal search terms, many of those are good for us to test out in paid as well. However, because these searches are happening only on our site, sometimes they can lean towards the overly broad (you know the only results are going to come from Viator.com, so why not be broader?). For example, “discount” is a big revenue driving internal search term for Viator, but I wouldn’t buy it in paid search.

5. Ask the Search Engines to Send You Some:

Funnily enough, if you say to your account manager, hey, I’d like to add some more keywords, send me some ideas, they will. I’ve even said specifically, send me some ideas about the Vatican, or Rome or some other specific guidance, and generally, since its means more money for them, the search engines are more than happy to make some suggestions. Like internal search, take these with several grains of salt, they might be way too broad or off topic, but I am sure you’ll find some gems as well. If you don’t have an account manager, you can often request optimizations or other help that will often lead to additional keyword suggestions.

My number one friend in the world of adding keywords is Excel. I download everything in Excel, including the master list of current keywords I maintain, and de-duplicate all the reports versus the master keyword list using vlookups. Clearing out anything I already have is always the first step before organizing and adding the new keywords. You can use Google Spreadsheets or another vlookup enabled spreadsheet program, but I need a lot more rows than what most other programs are capable of supporting.

(I can’t believe I just endorsed a Microsoft product, but I do love Excel, I can’t help it)

Searchers are ever evolving in their queries and so are the search engines, so there’s never a time to sit on your laurels, keep testing and adding new keywords!

I love this site, its too bad I am already married.

http://www.zombieharmony.com/

Some weeks ago I attended an ok webinar from Search Marketing Now, and to register I forked over some personal information, like my email and phone number. I can understand getting an email or two as a result, fair enough for a free webinar. But the sponsor of the webinar (not Search Marketing Now, but a paid advertiser of theirs) is calling me and leaving messages (yes, that means more than one message). I am not interested in their search marketing services, and evidenced both by me not checking that I was when I registered, noting that I manage the program in house when I registered, and the fact that I never return their phone calls. Isn’t this just over the line a bit?

To be fair, I have attended Search Marketing Now webinars in the past with no aggressive phone stalking after, it just seems like they got a lame sponsor for the most recent webinar. I am a little peeved they gave away my personal information to an advertiser without my permission, but probably never attending one of their seminars again is a fair response.

Tell me if I am being unreasonable here.