Click Forensics released their PPC fraud numbers for Q2 of 2008. The data is reports from data gathered from 4,000+ online agencies and advertisers across various industries.

• In Q2 2008, the industry average flick fraud rate was 16.2%. Down slightly from 16.3% in Q1 but higher than 15.8% of Q2 2007.
• Content Networks Fraud was 27.6%. Down slightly from 27.8% in Q1 2008, but up from 25.6% in Q1 2007.
• Most fraud originated from non-North American countries. China & Russia was responsible for 7.8% of all fraud.
• Botnet continues to grow in its sophistication and was responsible for more than 25% of all click fraud in Q2 2008.

Click Fraud companies have generally claimed a 12-20% click fraud rate, while search engines claim that % to more around the 2-6% range. Last year, click fraud became the hottest topic in search engine circles but have died down over the course of a year. During that time, the search engines have focused heavily on cracking down on click fraud and started to raise their communication level on what is being done with this issue. I personally believe the engines do a decent job of catching the majority of the fraud before it gets to our wallets, but there is always lots of room to improve. One thing that needs to be done is to standardize what click fraud entails as lot of what is being consider “fraud” is simply the nature of search engines and should be baked into the ROI data analysis. Having said that, here at LeadQual we work hard to catch any oddities, strange spikes and deal with the processes necessary to obtain refunds when there seems to be no other explanation.

Note: In our experience Google has been more helpful in digging into abnormalities and figuring out what caused the shift in the data than of Yahoo. Yahoo doesn’t explain what happened much, but they are more willing to shell out refunds as needed. (Can’t hurt to cultivate some competition right?).

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing

Top 4 Tips for Creating Effective Ad Copies

There are 4 main pieces in creating an effective search marketing campaign.

• Keyword Selection
• Creative Ad Copy
• Bidding Strategy
• Landing Pages

In this article we will focus on Creative Ad Copy also known as “Creatives”. Many of our clients vary in how much they would like to be involved in the ad copy process. Some are very strict in how we message value often needing approval from both their marketing team and their legal team. Other groups simply say, “You are the experts, make it happen”. Either way we always keep the client involved because we humbly acknowledge that our client knows far more about their products and their client base than we do (hopefully!).

However it is important to consider a few key things when it comes to creating an ad copy for search engine marketing. I’ve tried to boil it down to four main points.

1. Test, Test, then Test Again

The beauty of search engine marketing is that it is fully measurable. As long as you have your conversion tracking codes in place, you or your incredibly wonderful agency leadqual, can keep track of the click thru rate and the conversion rate of every ad variations. One of the biggest mistakes you could make is to limit your testing due to your strong inclinations or preferences. You may have a good grasp on what your client may be seeking when searching a particular keyterm, but hold that assumption loosely and be open to the data saying otherwise. Whether it is highlighting a product feature or a differentiator, you want to try different messaging and let the data show you what your clients want. You’ll often be surprised how the one you least expect to work becomes the gold mine while the one you were certain would be best turns out to be a dud. Also different keyword themes behave differently, so we always look at creative results on a granular level by keyword type.

If your account is very large, you should test 2-3 different global creatives across your accounts. Wait for a big enough sample size then cut out the poor performers. From this point you can test other creatives or just tweak variations of your current winner. Never test too many at once.

2. Cost Per Lead is where it’s at

Often it is easy to focus solely on click thru rate (CTR). It seems intuitive to look at CTR to see if an AD is effective in drawing visitors. This is true, but the next question to ask is what TYPE of visitors? If I put up an AD that says “Hey you click me now! First 20 clicks on this ad gets a free ipod!”.. you’ll probably get a ton of clicks, but no one is going to buy to fill out a form to get mortgage quotes. CTR is useful, but ultimately you have to ask yourself what the goal of your campaign is. Is it to get consumers to purchase something? Fill out a form? Click on an ad or listing? Then make that your point of reference when it comes to performance.

So is it conversion rate? Well yes and no. If you have a 30% conversion rate on one keyword and 10% conversion rate on another keyword which one is better? Most people will say the 30% conversion rate. Well what if I told you every click on the first keyword has a $5.00 cost per click (CPC), while the second keyword costs you $0.50 CPC. Just do the math and you’ll see the second one is far superior.

So in conclusion if your goal is to get the consumer to convert in some way, then what you want to measure success is by cost per lead. You can loosen your creative to get a stronger CTR at a lower Conversion Rate, or make it very tight and have a lower CTR and a higher Conversion Rate. You have to do the math and decide what works best.

3. Use Best Practices

Though I had emphasized the need to test, there are general best practices that as it says “generally” perform at a higher rate. Here are a few.

• Differentiate your message from your competitors: If everyone is doing it, do something else
• Emphasize your product/service differentiators
• Utilize Call to Action
• Use Attractive Language where applicable (i.e. free, easy)
• Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI): Test it. Be aware of what keywords combinations might be appearing on your ad. You don’t want ads that don’t make sense. (i.e. Indentured Servant – Whatever you’re looking for you can get it on eBay)
• Use Keywords related to your Adgroup. These will show up Bold.

4. Target your Ads to your Keywords or Geo Location

Sounds like a no brainer but not many do this well. You want your ad catered to the keyword that is being searched. This may mean making similar ads with tweaks for each keyword type. Again this is a lot of work that could heap large rewards. Consider if you typed in “2 bedroom apartments los angeles” in google. Which ad is more attractive to you?Hope that is pretty easy to understand.

2 Bedroom LA Apartments
Find Los Angeles Apartments Here
100s of 2 Bedroom Aprts Available

Apartment for Sale
Find Apartment Listings Here
100s of Apartments in Your Area

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – Search Engine Marketing

If you are planning to change your website domain, or change the path for file names, you will want to carefully consider the impact to your SEO rankings. The “history” and age of a page are important for SEO.  Web sites and web pages that are well established have more trust, have had time to be fully crawled and indexed, and also collect inbound links that significantly help rankings. If you change the website or page name, then you will likely take a big hit in your SEO rankings, and it will take time to recover (often lots of time!).

So does this mean you have to keep the same domain or path/page names forever? Fortunately, you don’t. There are ways to change your URLs and transfer your SEO history to the new names. The secret here is the effective use of HTTP 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect tells the search engine that a page (or website) has been permanently moved to another location. If you put in place 301 redirects for all of your old URLs to the new equivalent, it will tell search engines the old URL is being retired, and they should treat the new URL as the new name. Thus the search engines will start treating the new URL as the actual page, and work to replace instances of the old URL with the new one in their index. They will also treat links to the old URL as being links to the new one, thus preserving your hard-earned link popularity.

When you change a URL and use 301 redirects, you will typically recover most if not all of the SEO rankings you had previously, though it will still take a little time. Even with 301 redirects, it can take a few weeks for the search engine to discover all the new URLs and work them into the index, replacing the old. This could be longer for sites with low trust (new site or low page rank), or for sites with thousands of pages. If you have improved your URLs, such as a domain name that now contains keywords, or path/file names that don’t have parameters (all that ?name=value stuff), or added keywords to your path/file names, then you will likely improve rankings over the long term.

When you change URLs (domain name, path name or file name), make sure you do the following:

1. Change all instances of the old URLs in your site to the new ones. Don’t rely on the 301 redirects for your internal migration — that will look sloppy to the search engines.
2. Use an HTTP 301 redirect from all old URLs to all new ones.
3. Review your external links and ask prominent sites to use the new URL. Even though the 301 redirects will do most of the work for you, you still want to be collecting those direct links. You can find most of your external links by using the linkdomain:www.mydomain.com command at search.yahoo.com.
4. Always use the same capitalization for a URL for all references (new or old). For example, don’t use www.mydomain.com/ThisPage.html mixed with www.mydomain.com/thispage.html. To a search engine, those are two different pages.

When you do your redirects, make sure to use an HTTP 301 redirect. There are a number “wrong” types of redirects that will prevent your migration from succeeding, and you will lose all your rankings for a long time. Do not use an HTTP 302 redirect, JavaScript redirects, meta redirects or any other such technique.

If you have hundreds of URLs to migrate, you will want to automate the migration somehow. One technique is to use a 404 not-found page handler, which is a page or script that the web server will load when a page is not found. If you can do scripting within your 404 not-found page, you can look up the inbound URL in a table and find the new URL, and then issue a 301 redirect from the page script. This is easy to do with PHP, ASP, JSP and virtually any scripting language. With this approach, you just need a table of old/new URLs that can be read by the script. If you can create an algorithm for mapping old to new URLs (e.g., just replacing parts of the old URL), then the script could be coded to do that as well.

The bottom line here is that with a little work, you can migrate to a new domain or page names, and still preserve most or all of your SEO successes. You will see a dip during the migration, but with the proper techniques it should be temporary.

John Erickson
LeadQual

Yahoo! & Ichan have come to an agreement a few weeks ahead of the upcoming shareholders meeting. It was expected that the meeting would result in a contentious battle between Yang and his board and Carl Icahn and his supporters. Icahn had proposed ousting the entire Yahoo! board and replacing them with his own suggested group. However Yahoo! And Icahn agreed to expand its board to 11 members. Icahn and two new members will join the board while current director Robert Kotick will step down. The two new members are expected to be from the pool of board members recommended by Icahn.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing

Both Google & Microsoft reported their earnings today. Both search engine companies missed analyst’s estimates bringing up more question about how much the slowing economy is weighing on the search engine market.

Google fell $49.70 (-9.3%) to $473.74 as of 9:35PM PST. Microsoft slid $2.14 (-7.8%) to $25.37.

The missed targets brings up the concern that searchers are spending less online and the effect of the economy on the technology industry as a whole. Google reported a slowdown in the growth of consumers clicking on their online ads. Eric Schmidt said that Google faces “a more challenging economic environment” for the first time in a while. Though some technology companies, most notably Intel Corp, was able to beat estimates, the entire technology sector was brought down by the slow reported earnings.

Google also reported a higher than expected increase in research as their spend rose 65 percent which cut into their profits. Administrative expenses also rose 49 percent partly due to their fight against Viacom Inc.

LeadQual as a whole is starting feel the impact of the economy as many clients are curbing their spend or targeting higher ROI at the expense of volume. As LeadQual’s clients range across numerous industries, we see that some sectors such as real estate are hit the hardest while others like B2B continue to remain more steady. Though marketing dollars are being cut, many companies do end up allocating a larger percentage of their budget to SEM because it’s a medium that is fully trackable and easy to measure.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual - Search Engine Marketing