Archive for August, 2010

Viral marketing news and other viral happenings in Denver Metro, Boulder and beyond.

After too long a hiatus, Rocky Mountain Viral is back! My goal is to get these out monthly from now on. Here’s hoping.

Colorado Girls – one of the most tried-and-true ways to get YouTube traffic is to parody another very successful video. Anthropomorphize a cat or work in some South Park characters and you’ve got yourself a viral hit. Katy Perry’s wildly successful “California Gurlz” video has been this summer’s favorite target, keeping hundreds of parodists busy. At least 37 states have weighed in so far, but it turns out that Colorado girls are among the most popular, with this video garnering over 600,000 views on YouTube. The video was created by three friends in a couple of weeks with no budget. The lyrics are clever and it is well put together, but the real star of the video is our Front Range. The tourism board itself couldn’t have done a better job of stitching together all the quintessential details that make us, well, not California. See for yourself:

Cherry Creek Dance – In another story of native talent, I love this video featuring Emily Sasson of Cherry Creek Dance. The video is promoting her Wednesday night hip hop class, and has received over 4,600 views in just a few days. Sure, that doesn’t compare to Colorado Girls, but this is no parody and includes no South Park characters, just great dancing and great local business marketing.

And then there’s whiteboard girl – in a perfect case study of the is-it-real phenomenon,  ”Jenny” took the internet by storm early this month with her very public and scathing announcement that she was quitting her job. She emailed her coworkers photos of herself quitting with a whiteboard commentary on her boss and his Farmville habit. The photos were leaked to the website thechive.com:

We received the following photos last night from a person who works with this girl. Her name is Jenny (not confirmed) – we’re working our contact for Jenny’s last name…

It turns out that Jenny’s last name is Porterfield and her first name isn’t Jenny, it’s Elyse. Porterfield is a Glenwood Springs native and recent UNC graduate who did not quit her job, but is an aspiring actress who did a photoshoot for The Chive. She has a pretty face and was given a funny set of whiteboards and is now a hot commodity thanks to the hoax. Oh, and she’s a California girl now too. I think that’s fitting.

Do politicians just automatically count as viral? – wanting to get a jump on the competition, Time Magazine has already announced the best viral campaign ads of 2010. Among them is Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper trying to wash away negative campaign ads on his path to the governor’s office. I like his sentiment, but it seems like an ad should be viral to earn that distinction. With only 40,000 YouTube views for such a prominent campaign, I’m thinking Hick should hire the Colorado Girls crew to shoot his next video.

I was having lunch a few weeks ago with my friend Chandler who sells advertising at an online publisher and the topic of Twitter advertising came up. His personal viewpoint on Twitter is similar to one I’ve heard quite a bit recently: “I tried it out, but I didn’t get much out of it.” He said it tentatively, as if I might be offended, or exclaim some secret to extracting value from Twitter that had escaped him. But I have found myself questioning the value of Twitter recently as well. Our conversation evolved to this: there’s a lot of talking on Twitter and not much listening. As an advertising medium Twitter appears to have decent reach, but is reach meaningful if people aren’t really paying attention? Further, I have noticed that many of my recent followers look like this:

Notice the thousands of followers and the clear commercial agenda. What seems to be in vogue now is to follow thousands of people, then drop the ones that don’t follow back, then follow thousands more, and so on. Having lots of followers creates the impression that people give a crap, but it turns out that on Twitter, followers don’t equal influence.

My lunchtime conversation with Chandler concluded with the supposition that Twitter users must be getting more selective about who they actually listen to, if they are listening at all. An increase in advertising on Twitter will only heighten the need to filter out the signal from the noise, which means that advertisers will be putting a lot of effort in to marketing to the void.

I’ve been researching this topic and mulling it over since my conversation with Chandler, then got this email today from another friend:

It’s hard not to agree!
http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=3679
Hal

The link describes the story of Leo Laporte, a well-known technology journalist who stopped Tweeting for a few weeks only to find that nobody seemed to notice. In Leo’s words, “I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves.”

Laporte has nicely phrased what Chandler and I were trying to articulate, but my intervening research tells me that we had it at least partially wrong. I didn’t find any data trending people’s propensity to listen. A few things I did find:

• Only 7% of Americans actively use Twitter, but those 7% are more affluent, more educated and tend to be early technology adopters in comparison to the online population as a whole. They also seek and give brand and product advice using Twitter. Source: Edison Research
• 300,000 new users are signing up for Twitter every day. Source: Huffington Post
• Globally, Twitter use has exploded.Worldwide traffic to Twitter.com has more than doubled in the past year. Source: Comscore

With that kind of growth, it is too soon to say what Twitter is or isn’t. The way people are using Twitter is bound to be evolving. And anecdotally I know several local businesses that are finding new customers through their Twitter accounts. I still believe that broadcast advertising will fail on Twitter, but I don’t think we can extrapolate from our own personal experiences to say that Twitter is not an effective marketing medium. It may take work to get people to pay attention, but the payoff is a fast-growing, affluent population. If you are an SMB with limited time and resources, you should gauge the effort versus the return. If your target market is well-to-do, educated early-adopters, it is probably worth it. If you are a plumber or a dry cleaner, you should give it an honest try and see if you enjoy tweeting. If you find it a chore, your time is better spent elsewhere. At least for now.

And if you are looking for more tweets to ignore, mine are as good as any  @nicobrx

This list is intended for someone who is creating a new paid search advertising campaign. Much of it still applies if you are looking to grow an existing campaign or researching keywords for organic search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, but not all steps will apply in those cases. To keep things simple, I am only going to talk about Google. I usually do most of my research and testing in Google, then copy keywords and campaigns over to Yahoo and Bing.

This process can be fun and instructive if you think of yourself as a psychologist trying to understand how and when your prospects search for what you have to offer. I enjoy constructing theories about what’s in the head of searchers – I’m sure I’m mostly wrong, but it makes it more entertaining.

Spaghetti Against the Wall
When I’m building keyword lists, I don’t worry about how much volume each keyword drives or how much it costs to be in a top position. There’s really no downside to having a lot of keywords, and sometimes your best performers will come from places you don’t expect. I call it the spaghetti-against-the-wall approach – throw a lot of keywords out there, and a few will stick. Those are the ones I spend time optimizing.

Match Types
It is very important that you understand how match types work if you are adding keywords to your account. For an explanation of match types, see the article How to Use Google AdWords Match Types.

On to the to-do list…

The To-Do List (& a PDF version of the list for printing)

1. Get your ad groups going - Ad groups should correspond to individual products and/or services you offer as well as product/service groupings. For example, if you sell a variety of hammers, you should have an ad group for hammers in general, and ad groups for each type of hammer. Use your judgement regarding how specific to go – people might search for “ball peen hammers”, but they are less likely to search for “ball peen hammers with red handles”. The former merits an ad group, the latter probably not.
   When you are first creating ad groups, you don’t need to come up with a big list of keywords for each. I usually create a bunch of ad groups at a time, and I don’t worry about researching keywords until I have them all live. For example, if I am creating an ad group for “ball peen hammers”, I’ll probably create it with the single keyword “ball peen hammers”. It’s more efficient to get ad groups going, then go back and add keywords using the following techniques.
   
2. Add more keywords with the Google Keyword Tool - In the AdWords interface, go to Opportunities > Keyword Tool
   The Keyword Tool is useful for coming up with variations on keywords, but it can also be slow and tedious to go through results. It doesn’t do a good job at all of sorting keyword suggestions by relevancy. I usually sort the results by the column “Local Monthly Searches” (by clicking on those words) to see what keywords get the most volume. “Local” here refers to the country in which you are searching.
   At this stage, I’m mostly looking for high-volume variations. The Keyword Tool comes up with a lot of junk, but I usually find a few worth adding. Since I have sorted by search volume, I go down the list until I hit some reasonable volume threshold, say at least 1,000 searches per month. It may be more or less than that, depending on the category of keyword. To add keywords to an ad group, select the ones you’d like to add and click Add Keywords. You will be prompted to select an ad group.
   
   It is very helpful that the Keyword Tool gives volume numbers, but take them with a grain of salt. It defaults to showing volume for broad match keywords, which can be deceptive. On the left-hand side there is an option to switch it to exact match, which will give you a better idea of how often each individual keyword is searched. The volume numbers are also pretty unreliable. It will often show that a search term gets very low volume when in fact it gets decent volume.
3. Add even more keywords with Google’s Add/Edit suggestions - In the AdWords interface, go to Campaigns > Ad Groups > [select an ad group] > Keywords > Add Keywords
   This functionality is similar to the Keyword Tool, but does a much better job of grouping and prioritizing keywords that are relevant to your ad group. Recently, I’ve been using this tool more than the Keyword Tool to build keyword lists. It works best after you’ve added some keywords to the ad group, so best to get things started with the Keyword Tool. Per above, I use the Keyword Tool to find high-volume keywords, then I use this tool to add more specific variations.
   
4. Spy on your competitors - There are several tools that show which keywords are driving traffic to competitor sites. Looking at what your competitors are bidding-on and optimizing-for can be a good way to discover new categories of keywords and unusual opportunities that the Google tools won’t spot. Several to try are SEMRush, KeywordSpy and SpyFu. I lean towards SEMRush right now, but there is not much difference between the three. Each offers additional capabilities for a subscription, but try out the free versions first.
5. Set initial bids - There are two ways to approach this. If you are on a tight budget, start by bidding low and collect some data before you start raising bids. The downside of this approach is that with low bids it may take a while to collect enough data to make a change. If you are not on a tight budget, bid keywords high enough to get a top 3 position and adjust bids up or down as you collect performance data. This approach will generate sales faster, but you will waste some budget on non-performers as you collect data. For more on setting bids based on ROI data, see this article: Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI

Using this process, I find I can get a typical campaign going in an hour or two. Over time, I’ll go back in and re-apply these techniques to expand ad groups that are performing particularly well, and to look for new opportunities. There are also a number of more advanced techniques people use. I’ll include a couple here as extra credit:

1. The Search-Based Keyword Tool - Go to Opportunities > More tools … > Search-based Keyword Tool
   I find this tool is very finicky, but useful if you can get it to work. It looks at your site and draws on Google Analytics data to come up with keywords relevant to your content. It also tells you which page each keyword is associated with, which can be very helpful for organizing keywords in to ad groups. Google won’t tell you this (as of this writing), but the tool only works if you are signed up for Google Analytics and have your Analytics and AdWords accounts linked. It also won’t work from an MCC login. If you don’t know what that means, you don’t need to worry about it.
2. The Webmaster Tools Keyword Report - Log in to Webmaster Tools  > [your domain] > Your Site on the Web > Search Queries
   This report shows which keywords are driving traffic to your site via Google’s unpaid listings. This can be very helpful for identifying SEO opportunities, but also useful for paid search. You should be bidding on any keywords that are relevant to your business but for which you do not rank in the top few positions. In particular, this tool will show you keywords for which you are getting traffic, but rank poorly in organic search. For example, if you rank in position 9 for a keyword that is one of the top drivers of traffic to your site, you should add it to your paid search campaign. If you are not familiar with Webmaster Tools, click here to learn more: Webmaster Tools

There are also some subscription-based research tools that help the process of managing and growing keyword lists, Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery being two of the most well-known. I don’t believe these tools are worth it for an individual advertiser unless you find yourself spending many hours per month managing keywords.

Anyone have other suggestions for getting a keyword list put together quickly? I’d love to hear them if you do!

And if you’d like help with search marketing, please drop us a line or give us a call: Contact Us

Google AdWords allows you to specify a match type for each keyword you bid on. Yahoo and Bing do too, though there are some slight variations in how they work.  The three match types in Google are exact, phrase and broad.  The match type you choose tells the search engine when to match a user’s query to your keyword. Here’s how each match type works:

• Exact: your ad will be served when and only when a user enters the keyword you purchased. If you want to make a keyword exact match, you put square brackets around it when you enter it.
• Phrase: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased in the same order. For example, if you bid on “house music”, your ad will match the query “download house music”, but not the query “new orleans music house”. If you want to make a keyword phrase match, you put quotes around it when you enter it.
• Broad: your ad will be served when a user enters a phrase that includes the keywords you purchased, and not necessarily in the same order. Your ad will also be served when a user enters a phrase that Google deems equivalent to your keywords, such as misspellings, synonyms or pluralizations. For example, if you bid on “denver taxidermy”, your ad will likely match the following queries:
  • “taxidermy denver”
  • “denver taxidermists”
  • “a taxidermist near denver”

  Broad match is the default, so you don’t have to do anything to specify broad match.

Think of match types like funnels. Broad matching is like a big, wide funnel that catches lots of queries. Phrase matching is like a medium-sized funnel that catches more queries than exact, but fewer than broad. Exact matching is like a funnel that doesn’t get any wider at the top, which isn’t much good as a funnel.

Also, while they don’t behave quite like match types, you can add negative keywords to an ad group or campaign. A negative keyword tells Google not to serve an ad when that keyword is present in the query. For example, if you created an ad group with the broad match keyword “denver taxidermy” and the negative keyword “squirrel”, Google would not serve your ad if someone searched for “denver squirrel taxidermy”. If you want to add a negative keyword, you put a minus sign before the keyword with no space, e.g. “-squirrel”.

Here’s a crazy stat: people search 200 million keywords in Google that have never been searched before every single day*. That probably puts the total number of unique queries that have ever been done on Google somewhere in the hundreds of billions. Your goal is to get your ads to show for any of those queries that are relevant to the products or services you sell. The broad match type is the best way to do that, and is what I use most of the time. But broad matching can also result in irrelevant traffic, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on what keywords are driving visits to your site and add negative keywords where necessary. Most web analytics tools have a report that shows referring keywords, and the Google AdWords Search Query Performance Report shows some of the search phrases that were matched to your ad.

One trick I sometimes do is to add both an exact match version and a broad match version of the same keyword to an ad group. This allows me to see the performance of the exact match version, which is often better than the broad match version. Over time, I will bid up the exact match version if it is getting better results. For more on keyword bidding based on performance, see our article Paid Search Bidding Based on ROI.

It’s also not a good idea to just trust broad matching and not bother creating ads with variations of keywords you know are relevant to your business. Broad matching is a good way to catch keywords you don’t expect, but you should include any you do know about in your campaign. Doing so will help you understand the performance of each variation, and you can achieve higher quality scores by ensuring that text ads and landing pages are well matched to each keyword. See our article To-do List: Building a Keyword List for more on building keyword lists.

Lastly, Google’s Explanations of Match Types and Negatives: What are keyword matching options? – Adwords Help

* This stat is derived from search query data in these two posts: This week in search 1/8/10 and By the Numbers: Twitter vs Facebook vs Google Buzz