As a business, we sometimes find ourselves slipping into bad behavior, so we came up with this Twitter code of conduct. We aspire to the code, but don’t always succeed. Please let us know if we are falling short.

1. Be genuine. Nuff said.
2. Listen. What? You think you know everything?
3. Connect. Beautiful things happen when people connect.
4. Have fun. All work and no play makes Two Octobers a dull company.

twitter.com/twooctobers

Oh, and here is our formula for Twitter success: there is no formula, see 1. above.

And these are some of the fine people who’ve taught us about good twitizenship: @alizasherman, @boulderrunner, @clearviewwater, and @timeforcake

I did a long-range marketing strategy session today with some folks at a company that owns apartment buildings. In preparation, I put together this deck of cards, inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies:

In my deck, there are two sets of cards, one with media trends and the other with quotes describing what it means to dwell. We drew one card from each deck and spent a few minutes brainstorming on how the trend might be leveraged to address the sentiment(s) contained in the quote. We got through six or seven pairs of cards in about an hour. The group came up with some fantastic ideas, I was really pleased with how it turned out. They asked me to come back, so I think they were pleased too. I’d be happy to share more specifics on how I put together the cards and how we used them, if anyone is interested. Just let me know.

Most of my friends know I’ve been involved in search marketing for a long time, so I’m often asked to look over Google AdWords campaigns to see why they aren’t performing well. People even pay me to do this. The very first thing I do when I look over an account is to check for various default configurations that should ALWAYS be changed. Google makes it fairly easy to create an account, but their primary goal is to generate revenue, so most of their default settings are geared towards ensuring that they can spend every penny of an advertiser’s budget.

1. Auto-bidding = Here’s My Wallet, Let Me Know When It’s Empty

I hope whoever came up with this idea got a nice raise, because it has to have made Google a boatload of money. The basic idea of auto bidding is to say to Google, “I’m willing to spend up to $X per day, now you figure out how to spend it for me.” If that sounds like a good idea to you, I’ve got some Alta Vista shares I’ve been hanging on to that I’ll let go of for a steal. When auto bidding is enabled, Google will set your bids uniformly to make sure you are spending your entire budget. The “uniformly” part is the bit that will really screw you. It never makes sense to pay the same for all keywords in a campaign. Some keywords are likely to convert better than others, and at the very least the products or services you sell are not uniformly priced.
The fix: specify bids when you create ad groups. Bidding is a complex topic, but there are two primary considerations:

1. Bid low enough that you are not hitting your budget cap. I think of the budget cap in Google as a safety net, and control my spending by lowering bids. The reason for this is the fact that Google will blow your budget on a single click if they can. For example, let’s say your budget is $10/day and you bid $10 for a keyword. You could spend your budget with just one click, when you might have been able to get 10 clicks at $1 apiece.
2. Set bids based on how much revenue ads generate. In simple terms, this means you should pay twice as much per click for keywords that generate twice as much revenue. Here’s the less simple version: Paid Search: Bidding Based on ROI

2. Broad Matching Can Be Very Broad Indeed

I’ve already spent some time explaining match types, so I’ll only provide the short version here. When you add keywords, Google assumes you want to broad match them unless you add brackets or quotation marks. Broad matching means that Google will match your ad to any search phrase they deem similar to the intent of the keyword on which you are bidding. I’m in favor of broad matching, since people search in such weird and varied ways, but it can result in a lot of worthless clicks. For example, if you broad match the term “computer repair”, Google will show the ad when someone searches for “computer repair jobs”. This is a very real example and happens all the time.
The fix: add negative keywords to the ad group or campaign. Negative keywords tell Google not to show the ad when those keywords are present. For example, adding the negative keyword “jobs” would have prevented the issue above. There are two good ways to figure out which negative keywords you should add. One way is to click on See Search Terms on the Campaigns > Keywords tab. That will show you some of the search queries that have triggered your ads. If you see anything that doesn’t make sense, add the offending keyword as a negative. The other way is to enter your keywords in Google’s Keyword Tool and see what comes up. Again, if you see variations on your keyword that don’t make sense, add those as negatives.

3. What Is The Display Network, Anyway?

If you don’t specify otherwise, Google will show your ads on the display network. There are two ways of looking at what that means:

1. Google will show your ads next to relevant blog posts, articles and the like.
2. Google will fritter away your budget on every loser webmaster that has the 60 IQ points required to join the AdSense network.

Google emphasizes the first view, but there are a lot of haters out there that strongly believe the second. The truth is somewhere in between. I’ve had campaigns where more conversions came from display than search, and generated better ROI. But I’ve NEVER achieved good results by letting the default settings be. By default, display will be bid the same as search, and ad group organization that makes sense for search may not make sense for display. On the display network, ads are not matched based on specific keywords, they are matched based on topics that Google views as relating to the ad group as  a whole. For example, I once managed a campaign for someone who sold maps of cities and places in New Zealand. I had an ad group with keywords like “Auckland map”, “Christchurch map”, “Wellington map”, etc. I caught Google red-handed serving my ad on a page that had to do with maps, but nothing to do with New Zealand. And if you bid high enough, Google will start showing your ads all over the place, relevant or not.
The fix: set lower bids for the display network. Ideally, you can do this based on ROI, but a rule of thumb I use when I don’t have ROI data is to bid down until I’m getting no more than half my clicks from display. Also, make sure your ads clearly state important qualifying factors like what you are selling, where you are and whether you are selling to businesses or consumers. That helps prevent irrelevant traffic from clicking on your ad. Sometimes, I’ll even create separate campaigns for display, so I can tweak them with display distribution in mind.

4. One Ad Group Only Makes Sense If You Only Sell One Product

And even then, it may not make sense. When you create a campaign in Google, it is not at all obvious that you are also creating an ad group. I know this because I’ve had to field the question, “what is an ad group?” many times. An ad group is a grouping of keywords within a campaign. Ads are associated with an ad group, and a default bid is set for an ad group. Because Google hides the ad group structure in the default campaign setup process, I’ve come across many campaigns that have a wide variety of keywords stuffed in one ad group. There are a few reasons why this is a problem. One is that ads work much better if they are closely related to the products or services you are selling. A one-size-fits-all ad group means your ads have to be very general. Another reason is that clicks convert to sales at a much higher rate if you land visitors on a page specific to their interests. Lastly, as described above, you should set bids based on the revenue generated by keywords and groups of keywords.
The fix: create ad groups for each product or service you sell, and/or each landing page towards which you are driving traffic.

5. Default Geographic Targeting Is Generally Stupid

This is where my ads will show up if my ads are targeted to Denver Metro:

Um, hello? All of northern Colorado is Denver Metro? I’m pretty sure not too many people are driving the 5 hours from Rangely to Denver to pick up their dry cleaning. If you are targeting a campaign to a state or a country, Google’s targeting works pretty well, but selecting cities or metro areas is usually a bad idea.
The fix: go to the Custom location targeting screen and select a radius around your business. You may find your traffic goes way down, but the traffic that’s left is the traffic you want.

Honorable Mention: How come the AdWords user interface sucks so bad when they can create such a beautiful search UI?!?
I have the AdWords web interface more or less tattooed on my brain, but even I find it confusing. How do you create a second ad group after you’ve created a new account? Where do I find Ad Extensions (and why do I want to)? How come quality score doesn’t just display like everything else?
The Fix: use Google’s downloadable AdWords Editor. It’s not perfect, but it is much better than the web interface.

I admit that I’m being a little hard on Google. In fairness, most of the changes I’ve described add complexity to managing campaigns, and complexity has its downsides as well. On the other hand, there are many cases where Google has erred on the side of spending more of the advertiser’s money, and I can’t tell you how many campaigns I’ve looked at that were driving a lot of traffic and converting to zero sales. Google AdWords is a fantastic advertising medium when managed well, but many businesses never get past the crappy defaults I’ve described here. If you’d like help getting things set up or figuring anything out, please let us know.

Notes on Google Search Mapped Results: Eye Tracking Insights, by ionadas local and Sentient Services.

I saw Mike Blumenthal’s post on this study a few months back, but shame on me, I didn’t click through to read the actual research. Well, I did read the research last night, and it was well worth the effort.

User interface heat maps are eye candy for those of us obsessed with user experience and search behavior, but in reality they aren’t all that useful. They give you a feeling for how users experience a page, but not much more than that. The part about this study I like most is the quantitative analysis they did to accompany the heat maps. For example, here is a heat map showing how users’ eyes tracked the results page for the search “Austin Eye Doctor”:

And here is a quantitative analysis of that same view, showing average total fixation for each element on the page:

I won’t repeat ionadas’ insights, read the study if you want those. It’s not very long (lots of pictures) and well worth it. But a few things struck me as I read it:

• Web search results (as opposed to map-based local results), hardly matter at all for local search, unless they show up above the map results.
• Yes, the top organic local search result is the place to be, but in the case of the “Austin Eye Doctor” query, the ad above the results performed better than all but that first result. Unfortunately, only two out of the four queries in the study had ads placed above map results, so best not to generalize too much.
• Searchers actually seem to understand what they are looking at! This study made me realize that my thinking has been stuck in the past. In the early days of search advertising, a couple of studies showed that searchers didn’t know the difference between search ads and organic search results. Since then, I’ve been assuming that most people don’t understand what makes up a Google search results page, and how the sources of information differ. This study clearly shows that people do have a feel for how the information sources vary, and favor those that are more rewarding.

Note that Google changed the layout of local search results shortly after this study was completed, but I don’t think that significantly impacts my comments or ionada’s findings.

I’ve spent much of the last 10 years building tools that automate online marketing tasks. Early on, I had a grand vision of creating an application that would perfectly distribute marketing investment based on an advertiser’s ROI goals. But along the way, I met a few, very smart people who changed my thinking.

Before I get to them, let me introduce the bread machine problem. Bread machines are great, I’m told. You put a few ingredients in, press a button, and voila!, steaming hot bread comes out. Bread machine advocates will say, “no, it’s not as good as fresh bread from a bakery, but that’s not the point. It’s easy and beats bread that comes out of a bag from the grocery store.” I can’t argue with that.

As a designer of a different sort of appliance, I think I have an idea of what goes through the minds of bread machine designers.

If we just add these settings, people will have more control over the bread they make!

Yeah, but we are not building this for master chefs, it has to be dead simple for our market.

I’ve encountered that problem countless times when designing software. Too many knobs and levers and you’ve lost most of your market, too few and you are helping people achieve slightly better than mediocre results.

So, back to the people who changed my thinking. Each used software I had a hand in designing. First, came Teddie Cowell. He was the epitome of the power user, haranguing me weekly for features and always saying, “I don’t need documentation, just let me see the algorithm.” Then there was Tushar Balsara. His chant was, “API’s API’s API’s!” He used our tool, but was trying to plug it into his own vast and complex system for data analysis. Last was Brendan Kitts. He took our software, asked all the right questions, then built his own. Crafty bastard.

These are the kind of guys who, given a bread machine, will have it out on the table in days, with bits dissasembled and settings overridden. More importantly, these are the kind of guys who produce the very best results in online marketing – I know that because I saw what they were doing for their clients. They made me realize that trying to fully-automate marketing will always produce mediocre results. Building tools that are simple for the user will inevitably lead to the bread machine problem.

Marketing automation is hard because every business has different goals, and advertises in different media, and collects data through different means. On top of that, opportunities are always changing, with new ad products and marketing channels being introduced every day. In my experience, the best solutions usually entail smart hackers like Teddie, Tushar and Brendan, and cobbled together tools with some home-built stitching in between.

If you are a business, don’t trust a vendor that tells you their tool will manage it all for you. Look for the crafty hacker. Most of the time he or she can be found at an agency that also builds tools, or a tool builder that also provides agency services.

Bread photo credit: avlxyz

In case you got here without knowing who we are, Two Octobers is a local online marketing services firm, based in Denver, Colorado. Two Octobers was formed in 2010 by Nico Brooks (me), and Kris Skavish.

Kris and I also worked together before Two Octobers. This time last year we were putting together the 2010 business plan for our previous employer. We had worked on the 2008 and 2009 plans in the prior years as well. We put a lot of work into our parts of each of these plans.  And we encountered challenges typical of business planning: personality conflicts between team members; lack of consensus on direction; and the need to turn guesswork into quantitative estimates.

This year, we have our own business to plan, but we are NOT spending a lot of time planning. Like most business plan documents, each we’d worked on in the past was largely ignored after the document was completed. We are not going to repeat those mistakes.

Somewhere along the way, Kris and I came up with the nicknames Plan and Flow, her Plan, me Flow. This stemmed from the fact that I am more comfortable going with the flow and she is more comfortable setting forth a plan. But we both recognize the value of the other. No plan, and we let circumstance decide our fate. No flow, and we stubbornly ignore the realities of a changing world.

So what is our plan for 2011? We don’t know. That is not to say that we lack focus:

• We have passion: we love locally owned businesses and what they do for communities.
• We have knowledge: we have both been helping businesses gain and strengthen customer relationships online for more than ten years.
• We have direction: we will continue to develop tools, methods and relationships that help locally-focused businesses market online.

We have also decided to set aside four hours every month to conduct a planning session where we will tackle whatever topics are most pressing to our business. This is a good compromise for our personalities, and I think it will turn out to be a great way to steer our business.

We are very excited about the New Year, and proud of our accomplishments in 2010. We have helped a good number of local businesses exactly as we set out to do, and we have some great projects in the hopper. But most of all we took a big metaphorical trust-fall in 2010, hoping you, our friends, would catch us and you did. Everything we have accomplished has been because of you. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts, and cheers to 2011!

Where various online marketing tactics fit, in terms of the goals they serve:

How To Read This Chart

This chart illustrates where various online marketing tactics fit in the overall marketing mix, e.g. how business goals are served by each tactic. Look at it as two linear scales, one showing whether a tactic is more geared towards driving simple sales versus complex sales, the other showing whether a tactic addresses a customer need or creates interest among prospective customers. If a tactic falls on the middle line, it is equally useful for either end of the scale. For example, viral videos are more useful for creating interest than addressing a need by far, but they work equally well for simple and complex sales.

Also, the chart does not show the impact of a given tactic, just where it fits in the mix. For example, Slideshare may be more useful for driving complex sales than simple sales, but SEO is a much more impactful tactic overall.

I thought about creating the chart after a conversation with a prospect. The prospect is Railyard Fitness, who makes a modular and mobile course for physical conditioning. What struck me in my conversation was that the market of people looking for a system like Railyard is very small, but the market of people who could benefit from Railyard is huge. Also, two primary markets for Railyard are fitness clubs and schools. In both cases, a sale will probably include multiple decision makers and multiple points of contact. In sales parlance, that makes it a complex versus a simple sale. As I thought about different marketing tactics, I started classifying them according to their usefulness for serving Railyard’s goals. Their big opportunity is in the upper-right quadrant of the chart.

Prioritization is one of the main things Two Octobers focuses on when helping a business with marketing. We mostly work with smaller businesses – Nike or Best Buy can afford to be investing in all of the tactics above and more, but a small business is better off focusing on a few, so picking the right ones becomes very important. In that regard, I consider this chart more of a hypothesis than hard fact. I drew from my experience to place each tactic, but plan on refining it and testing with real data over time. I also wonder if separate charts are necessary for products versus services and business-to-business sales versus business-to-consumer. Still, I think it’s a useful way of thinking about marketing efforts. I’d love to hear your thoughts too.

…and 5 reasons they are.

There is a common misconception that blogging will automatically generate a boon in search engine traffic, and is therefore a valuable activity for every business. Below are three reasons why blogs are not necessarily all that beneficial for local businesses, followed by a few good reasons to blog.

1. Web SEO isn’t as important as it used to be for local businesses.

Look at Google results for search terms relating to your business. How far down do you have to go before you reach web results, much less a blog post? Google and other search engines show map results for most queries relating to local business. Writing a blog will have little or no impact on your maps ranking.

Google results for the query, “plumber denver”.

2. Blogging generates long-tail traffic, which rarely converts to a sale for a local business.

The “long tail” refers to the millions of unusual or very specific search phrases that get searched every day. “half time show monday night football” is an example of a long tail search phrase. Blog posts tend to do well in long-tail search because they are focused on very specific topics. Our experience is that these searches are generally more informational, and less likely to turn into customers. We have also found the bounce rates to be pretty high – i.e. you might get a visit, but the person leaves your site right away. Not much ROI in that.

On the other hand, higher volume searches such as “plumber” or “denver accountant” are very competitive. You need to have an authoritative web site and/or lots of inbound links to rank for keywords like that – just writing a blog post won’t do it.

Blog posts tend to do well for long-tail search terms.

3. Blogging reaches a national or international audience.

We see this time and time again. We look at web analytics data for blog views and find that visits are coming from all over. It may feel good to see your traffic numbers go up, but how much value is there in getting visitors from Florida or Japan if you only do business in Colorado?

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Our goal here is to dispel some misconceptions about the SEO benefits of blogging, but that is not to say that there are no benefits at all. If you keep at it, you will see traffic grow over time. The main point we want to make is that the ROI of blogging for local businesses is questionable. Doing it well takes a good deal of time and energy, and is not likely to generate a lot of new customers. That said, there are a few good reasons local businesses should consider blogging:

1. Credibility: many consumers check out a business’ website before making a purchasing decision. An active blog is a great way to build and re-enforce credibility for those consumers.
2. Sales: while a blog may not be great at attracting new prospects, it can be a useful sales tool. Sending a prospect a blog post, “hey, based on our conversation, I thought you might be interested in this,” is a great way to keep a dialogue going.
3. Education: I take every blog post I write as an opportunity to learn something new. I find I have a much better understanding of a topic after I write about it, and am better able to express my point of view.
4. Networking: many of the most avid and thoughtful blog readers are also blog writers. Over time, you will develop a network of people you follow and admire, and who follow and admire you in return.
5. Lastly, if you are in the knowledge business, a blog is a great way of building your brand. Professions such as financial planning, marketing and most types of consulting sell expertise. A successful blog helps establish you as an expert.

This article is based on our experience with several dozen local businesses, as well as research we’ve done on consumers’ local search behavior. If you’ve had different experiences, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below! And if you’d like to discuss what the ROI for blogging might be for your local business, give us a call.

Think of a website like a storefront.

No one loves analogies more than I do. I’ve even used analogies to explain analogies. But sometimes they can be dangerous. If an analogy provides a mental model that mostly fits, it can blind a person to important truths.

A website is like a storefront, and it is nothing like a storefront. A storefront has one main entry point. A person can evaluate the storefront from the outside. A store owner has a large degree of control over the experience people have as they walk through the door. A website has many entry points. In fact, visitors coming from search engines and social media sites rarely come through the front entrance. In the case of TwoOctobers.com, 14% of visitors land on the home page.

Web designers often create a user experience that assumes visitors will see the home page of a site. In the worst cases, basic information establishing credibility and business focus only exists on the home page. When you think about how people are experiencing your site, you could be doing yourself a disservice.

Designing for Entry Page Behavior

A few things to think about when designing pages and navigation:

• Watch for hot entry pages and spend a little extra time on those. On this site, The Top 10 Free Places to List Your Business is the number one entry point. I’ve already gone back a few times to improve the post and tune the user experience. And I should probably be doing more. It is likely that your site has similar such entry points. Do you have a dusty old blog post or service description page that garners a lot of traffic? Spruce it up! Link to other related and popular content from that page, and consider adding text that explains who you are and what you do.
• Don’t think of navigation as a hierarchy of categories (unless you are in the hierarchy-of-categories business), think of it as signage.  Good signage doesn’t try to tell you where everything is all the time, it focuses on what is close by or likely to be important to you.
• Allocate design effort based on how people are using your site. Joshua Porter of User Interface Engineering proposes an approach that is the inverse of most people’s thinking: visitors spend most of their time deep in site content, so spend less time on your home page and more time improving the user experience of popular content sections. Read his article Prioritizing Design Time: A Long Tail Approach for a better explanation.

Data points on this topic – check out the articles too, they’re very good:

• Andrew Hanelly of TMG Custom Media looked at web traffic for 20 different sites. For most, the home page was the entry point for fewer than 20% of visitors.
• Joshua Porter found that the home page accounted for less than 10% of page views on www.uie.com.
• Gerry McGovern, author and CEO of Customer Carewords reported on a general trend of diminishing traffic to sites’ home pages. I also really like Louise Hewitt‘s suggestions in the comments:
  • Usability test from a non-specific location (e.g. a blank desktop) and ask the user to complete the task.
  • Present sub-page wireframes first and then ‘collect together’ with a home page at the end of the design presentation.
  • Include non-page based designs for user journeys that start before the site is accessed and end after it.

Click on the image for a big version, suitable for framing.

My colleague Kris wrote a fine post a couple of weeks ago on the importance of online reviews for local business, and how to get them. Following that post, we did a little research to figure out how reviews get passed around between major local search sites in the US. This graphic illustrates some of our findings. If an arrow is pointing from one site to another, it means reviews from the source site are showing up on the destination site. An arrow with a dotted line means we found very inconsistent results, i.e. reviews from the source site might show up on the destination site, but often don’t. We sampled a variety of business categories around the country in our research, but may well have missed some relationships. The number in parenthesis next to the site name is our estimate of monthly visits to the site. Some of these are taken straight from Compete.com, but some required a little more figuring. More on estimation below.

A Few Interesting Relationships

While researching, we noticed a few interesting relationships:

• AOL recently started showing Mapquest results for local category and business name searches in their search engine.
• While Google gathers review content from many sites, Citysearch, Yelp, Insider Pages and Judy’s Book tend to be more visible than other sites mentioned here.
• Insider Pages and Citysearch (both owned by IAC) almost behave like two front ends to the same source data. Most content is shared back and forth between the two, and almost all sites that show Citysearch reviews also show Insider Pages reviews.

How We Estimated Visits

We thought it would be useful to include traffic estimates in our diagram, but take them with a good sized grain of salt. Measurement of web traffic is an inexact science in any circumstance, and becomes even more difficult when you are trying to understand the local intent of searchers on a general search site like www.Google.com. For Yahoo, Bing and Google, we estimated that 10% of general search traffic has local, commercial intent. We also added 10% of AOL search traffic to Mapquest, since Mapquest results are shown for local results on AOL. You can see the logic behind using 10% in our “What Percentage of Search is Local?” post, but it’s just a ballpark. In any case, we believe industry estimates often underrepresent how much local search is happening on the big search engines.

There is also some difference between the nature of local search happening on the sites we included. For example, people going to Mapquest are less likely to be looking for a new dry cleaner, and more likely to be finding directions on a map. Conversely, people going to Yelp are a prime target for influencing – the site is all about helping people make commercial decisions. So again, take volume numbers with a grain of salt.

If We Were To Pick Three…

…that are more important than the rest, we’d say Citysearch, Yelp and Yahoo Local. Citysearch is  a slam dunk – their reviews show up on almost every site, and get prominent placement on many. Yelp is our second choice because the Yelp community is very active and reviews are all that matters on Yelp. Yelp reviews also get good placement on Google Place Pages and get syndicated to a number of smaller sites that are not on this chart. Yahoo Local is important because 3rd party reviews are ghettoized on Yahoo. You have to click the “web reviews” tab to see them, and the star rating displayed in Yahoo search results is based on Yahoo reviews.

Google is also putting more emphasis on reviews in their results. For the time being Citysearch and Yelp will have you covered in Google, but once Google gets enough review content, they may start to favor their own reviews.

Niche Sites

We looked at major local search sites serving the US market, and a few smaller properties that are influential in the review space. When encouraging reviews for your business, you should also look for sites that are specific to your vertical or location, as these can be important to your target customer. For example, Urbanspoon and Opentable are important restaurant review sites, and Tripadvisor is very important for travel. To find sites in your niche, search for your business category in Google Maps, and see where your competitors are getting reviews.

Do you have experience with web reviews? We’d love to hear your thoughts!