Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Marketing’

Today I am posting a presentation on the new first page bids and dynamic quality scores for Google AdWords. It is my hope that the new quality scores and bidding algorithms will force pay per click marketers to become smarter; however I do agree with Paul Lee that there is a chance that more “dumb money” will be floating around. My belief is that after all of the “dumb money” is spent, many advertisers will look back to see that they received very low ROIs and will be forced to either leave pay-per-click marketing or use an agency that is ROI-focused. It looks like SlideShare.net does not properly sync up PowerPoint 2007 presentations as well as I hoped, but it gets the message across.

Please remember that many agencies are not focused or concerned about your returns and only wish to spend more of your money on pay-per-click systems. Just in business, less can sometimes mean more when it comes to keyword bidding.

LeadQual has some internal algorithms for determining keyword bid positions, called MONACO (Monetization and Cost Analysis) and I am very eager to be working on updating these algorithms with the new first page bidding and dynamic quality scores in place!

- Nicholas Abramovic

The following is a type of match that less than 1% of all advertisers are familiar with.

Quick Definition: Negative embedded match gives an advertiser the ability to show every variation of a keyword, except for the keyword.

What does this mean?

Example: “San Francisco Real Estate”

This will allow me to show up for “Real Estate San Francisco”, “San Francisco Real Estate Today”, “Francisco Real San Estate” but not “San Francisco Real Estate”

Why is this useful for search engine marketers?

1. Negative embedded match allows you control over conflicts between multiple keywords (with multiple match types) that are all eligible for triggering potential ads.  – This is critical if you are running multiple keyword match types in various AdWords accounts.

Example: Account 1 has only broad keywords while Account 2 has the same exact keywords but in exact match. In this example Account 1 would be implementing negative embedded match.

2)  Allows ads not to be displayed for keywords that produce low return on investments, but yet appear for specific keyword variations.

Example: “San Francisco Real Estate” derives a conversion rate of 1%, while variations such as “Cheap San Francisco Real Estate” or “San Francisco Real Estate Companies” produce 5% conversion rates. With endless variations of “San Francisco Real Estate” it is most efficient to run negative embedded match.

How does this work?

Let’s use the example of just “real estate” this time.  We are a national chain that sells real estate, however the keyword “real estate” brings in very little conversions, or conversions at an unaffordable price-point.  We know that three word combinations and four word combinations (“San Francisco real estate”, “Denver real estate”, “real estate in San Diego”) have excellent ROIs.

In our example we would insert –[real estate] into our ad group to appear for all variations except “real estate” when someone searches Google.

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Final NotesEffective search marketing requires more and more control over keywords.By using negative embedded matching we can pull search query reports to see what variations users typed into Google and which of keywords provide the highest return on investment.

If your vertical contains high traffic and there is budget for keyword testing, I strongly encourage implementing negative embedded matching to hunt the long-tail of effective keywords.

Happy Hunting,
Nicholas Abramovic

When avoiding work, Nicholas spends his day -[blogging about] 

Getting your news article posted on Google News or Yahoo News can be a big boon for gaining website visitors. In one day you could potentially get thousands of visitors coming to your site for the first time. Yahoo News is the most popular news aggregator in terms of usage. Google News hasn’t picked up such a following yet but it serves the results with a similar type of algorithm like its normal search counterpart. It serves news it deems to be relevant and from sites that it deems to have authority.

You can always go through a PR firm which will help get your articles shown on these sites, but did you know you can directly submit them to the engines yourself? If you’d like to get your article listed on Google News, you need to go ahead and submit your site or blog directly to Google News or Yahoo News. The catch is that your website will be reviewed and either accepted or rejected depending on several factors.

Originality & Validity
1. Is the content original or just rewritten news found anywhere on the web?
2. Organization Information
3. Author Information, Multiple Authors is better
4. Transparency – Name of Author in each post
5. Focus of the site (is it a specific news category, segment or industry) and its relevancy?
6. Frequency of Articles (should have multiple posts per day)
7. Look and Feel of site – is it like a news site? Are there images and videos?
8. Is there advertising on the site? (a sign of traffic volume)

URLs
9. URL for each article must be static
10. URL for each article must have a unique number consisting of at least 3 digits (this has been debated, but always safer to do)

Others
11. Site Load Speed

To further enhance your case you can provide
1. Statistics
2. Historical Background of site
3. List of Awards
4. Talk about Editors and Authors
5. Who links to your site

Here is where you can submit them.
Google News
Yahoo News

Hope this helps!

Please feel free to comment with thoughts, suggestions and questions.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – SEM

Google is changing the way they measure your Quality Score. Though Google uses an auction bid type system for its Adwords management, much of your position ranking is currently determined by how relevant Google deems your structure, ad, keyword and landingpages are with one another. Then it takes that score, factors in your account history, click through rate and many other factors and this final “score” is often called “Quality Score” or “index”. If this Quality score is too low, Google will raise the minimum bid required to show your ad. This is how more established players who have good history and have properly structured and optimized accounts can out position you with a $0.10 bid while you may be unable to show your ad even at a $2 bid.

The news out of Google is that in the next few days, the Quality Score, which used to be static and by keyword, will now be calculated at the time of each query.
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Search Engine	Searches	YOY Growth	Market Share
TOTAL	7,996,956	3%	100%
Google	4,812,974	16%	60.2%
Yahoo!	4,812,974	-11%	17.4%
MSN/Live	1,393,723	-10%	11.9%
AOL	369,611	-9%	4.6%
ASK	162,337	13%	2%

Source: Nielsen Online

Google continues to grow both in searches in and in market share. In July Google’s searches increased 16% over last year. Yahoo’s searches decreased 11 percent while Microsoft searches dropped 10%. Ask.com which has shifted its focus to targeting soccer moms and women grew 13% for 2% of the market share. Microsoft however had made a lot of gains in the past few months by providing monetary incentives to searchers for using their live.com search engine. It has brought many users to their site and increased their market share.

However Google owns 60 percent of the 8 billion searches and continues to own this market by a large lead. The industry as a total increased 3 percent in terms of total searches.

Paul Lee
Director of Online Marketing
LeadQual – Search Engine Marketing