The article, titled “Economy Down and Google Up“, opened by pointing out Google’s recent revenue gains and moved on to a topic that is actually becoming very apparent in my own experiences lately. I’ve been working with a traditional broadcast media agency and can clearly see the shift in budgets to more performance-based interactive channels. I believe that it is a combination of multitudes of marketers finally “getting” interactive media and, as Mike’s article points out, the slowed economy which causes businesses to look for the most efficient means to reach their audience. I’m not one to complain.

Just today, I was searching for “Boston Medical Group” in Google. (Just for the record I am not a prospective patient.) (Not that there is anything wrong with being a patient of the Boston Medical Group.)

Mixed in with Boston Medical Group’s own website, the results are scattered with patient question on medical forums, local directory listings and some glaring consumer complaint sites.

I think that it is perfectly ethical for the owners of these consumer complaint sites to give people a voice against bad consumer experiences. I don’t even mind that they are actively optimizing their sites for the brand names in order to look more relevant to the search engines. What bothers me is the way these sites all seem to cater to both sides. Every consumer complaint site that I ran across while searching for Boston Medical Group had extremely negative, apparently user generated content. (anonymously posted, of course) At the same time, the sites offer “Reputation Management” services for companies to purchase, which, from what I can gather from their vague description, will remove your listing from the site - and hence Google’s search results page. It seems to me that the people running these sites are simply online extortionists. (and there is something wrong with that.)

In my opinion, Google and the other major search engines should be investigating consumer complaint sites that are getting massive exposure through their results for branded terms like Boston Medical Group, then asking for money to have the negative publicity removed. I need to look into this more…

As I mentioned in a previous post, LA Web Ventures is a meetup group that I started in order to provide a venue for Los Angeles web entrepreneurs to network with and learn from others who have launched successful entrepreneurial ventures online.

On July 26th, our next meeting will include a discussion on how to identify and create opportunities through strategic partnerships. This discussion will include practical, real-world examples for small, medium and large businesses. The group will learn about how businesses are succeeding by leveraging their current assets in new ways through partnerships.

Jeff Rohwer will be leading this discussion. He is an interactive marketing strategist and consultant with over 10 years of experience in designing, developing and deploying strategic, technical solutions for a wide range of industries including health care and hospitality.

If you’d like to attend the next meetup, you can get more information and RSVP here.

The lack of solid scalability planning in twitters platform causes enough downtime to spawn sites, groups and even products surrounding the social utility’s iconic “Fail Whale” that is displayed when the site is inaccessible.

As I logged in tonight, I see that there is system maintenance planned for 6pm PST on July 4th. I think that even the most useless sites on the internet don’t do maintenance on major holidays. What adds insult to injury is that twitter’s main function is intended to let people know what you are up to. A lot of “twits” will be stagnant for 2 hours while they wait for twitter to come back online to find out where the best fireworks gathering is taking place.

Brian Monroe, Director Product Management at Eventful.com was the featured guest for the July MOTM. An interactive discussion lasted about an hour and focused on how to tap into their “Demand It’ feature, which touts over six million registered users. The group brought up some good points and asked very engaging questions; providing feedback on how to best monetize Eventful.com.

Of course, I had to snap a few photos of the July MOTM event at Suki 7 Lounge.

The email mentioned that Google AdSense Referral codes will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August, creating a lot of work for individuals participating in Google’s initial attempt at pay-for-performance marketing.

This does not come as a surprise, as Google was inevitably going to utilize DoubleClick’s affiliate platform (DoubleClick Performics) for it’s pay-for-performance offering. As a result, DoubleClick’s Affiliate Network will now operate as the “Google Affiliate Network”. I would imagine that with better resources and reporting, the Google Affiliate Network will become a force to be reckoned with. I personally found the outgoing AdSense Referral Program a bit quirky and lacking cohesiveness.
The actual email that I received reads:

Hello,

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense
Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate
your patience during this transition and here are some alternative
options to consider:

* Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of
DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now
operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting
users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense
Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers
to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on
advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For
further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
* AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense
for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the
referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google
products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals
code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:

* Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a
moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last
week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your
ad space.
* Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create
and save all reports related to the referrals program on your
desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign
information

Why is this happening?
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing
and supporting features which drive the best monetization results
for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing
features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most
effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring
the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional
questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Sincerely.

The Google AdSense Team

The meeting was hosted by CitrusByte, a high end web application development agency that operates out of a 4000 square foot mini-mansion. I was happy to find that the group was made up of a diverse range of friendly people with equally diverse backgrounds, for example:

• She owns a growing party planning website (and brought along her publicist)
• He works as an Apple engineer - and has great ideas on how to provide useful information from mining and compiling overlooked customer data within companies
• He is a QuickBooks Counselor, representing a local SBDC (small business development center)
• He works for Experian Marketing Services, helping fortune 500 companies with their email marketing programs

Since this was a first meetup, the discussion was kept open and free flowing. We began talking about the importance of the “little things” that you can uncover in your analytics and quickly dove into a discussion on shopping cart abandonment. It was brought up that re-engaging lost site visitors via email or other mechanisms can be a great tactic for increasing the overall conversion rate of just about any website. A few tools were mentioned, which I am gathering the links for and will post soon.

Some of the tools and platforms that were mentioned in the discussion:

• Google Analytics - free website analytics platform
• FeedBurner - RSS (and other seemingly un-trackable) channel analytics and promotional tool
• SpyFu - competitive analysis tool
• iContact - email marketing and surveying platform

Afterward, CitrusByte held a barbecue which brought in people from all corners of the interactive space and went on well into the night.

Facebook will be discontinuing Network Pages, a feature that stemmed from the early days when Facebook was solely for students. As some may recall, Facebook initially launched and gained popularity as semi-isolated micro-communities within the community, requiring a school email in order to join one of these networks.

When Facebook opened its doors to the masses in late 2006, Facebook Networks became more of a geographic based categorization that I felt was not very useful. Being a part of a group as big as a major metropolitan area reduces the overall relevancy of the information that is provided about activity in the area. I’d much rather be a part of self-selected niche groups that relate to what I am interested in and communicated this to several Facebook insiders in the past.

The official response that I received from Facebook when I inquired about this decision:

“Facebook has decided to remove the Network Portals because we have found that most users tend to get network information from their feeds, such as News Feed and Mini-Feed, rather than navigating to the portals. Groups, Pages and users’ feeds continue to enable users to connect with the people in their networks and discover the most relevant information.”

The Facebook Network Pages were a good idea when a network was a users school, creating that micro-community feel for users. I think that the people behind Facebook are on top of things and are making a lot of good decisions that will ultimately benefit them as Facebook continues to evolve.

To my surprise, this is the alert that I received when I logged into my Adwords account this morning. It seems that Google has made a strategic decision that completely overstepped boundaries of ethics and common sense.

About Google Adwords Automatic Matching

Basically, the largest paid search advertising platform, Google Adwords, will now begin automatically adding new keywords to their advertisers campaigns. These words will spawn existing ads with the highest quality score (basically CTR) and drive users to the landing page associated with the ad. You can read the official Google Adwords Automatic Matching description if you’d like more detail; although I would imagine it will change as the industry reacts.

Google has been beta testing this Automatic Matching for a few months now and chose the day before a 3-day weekend to automatically enable this feature on Adwords advertiser accounts. At first glance some users might think this is great, since the platform will find and test new, related keywords that advertisers may have not known about. When looking at this decision by the Google Adwords team a bit closer, it is easy to see that this is not only a bad move, but more importantly, an unethical one.

Why Google Adwords Automatic Matching was poorly executed

1- No focus on REAL performance metrics
According to Google:

The system will continually monitor your performance on these queries and adjust its matches accordingly. Automatic matching aims to show your ads only on queries that yield a high clickthrough rate (CTR) and a cost-per-click (CPC) comparable to or better than your ad group’s current average CPC. This way, your ads receive additional targeted traffic at a similar cost to your current traffic.

Higher click-through rates (CTR) do not mean much for most advertisers, who are focused on the resulting user behavior beyond the click at the keyword level. Anyone that has ever measured conversions (sales, sign ups, key page visits…) knows how much variance there can be from one keyword to another, so adding new keywords with a high CTR only ensures one thing - Google is going to max out advertisers daily budgets.

Some may like getting the extra traffic, but for advertisers that are working on a tight margin, this could actually put their cost per conversion over their threshold, causing them to lose money due to an inefficient campaign configuration.

2 - Some Advertisers Keywords are Regulated
Having managed several pharmaceutical campaigns, I know that the specific keywords that are used require legal and regulatory review in order to ensure compliance with FDA regulations. Adding new keywords will automatically wind up tossing this important consumer protection layer out the window, possibly causing searchers to become misinformed about what conditions a drug effectively treats among other mishaps.

Aside from the pharmaceutical industry, I can see a lot of copyright infringement and brand misuse by affiliates and even companies themselves that have not added comprehensive negative keywords to their ad groups.

3 - Automatic Opt-In
Come on. Seriously. Automatically enabling this type of feature is straight up unethical. This should be something that advertisers can review and then decide on themselves.

4- Bad Timing and Lack of Communication
I can’t imagine that the Memorial Day holiday weekend didn’t cross the minds of Google Adwords decision makers when choosing a date to launch this feature, which is automatically enabled. How much additional ad revenue will they make by pushing the budget limits of their advertisers campaigns for a few days before everyone returns to work and has a chance to disable this feature?

Aside from that, I personally received no communication regarding Google Adwords Automatic Matching prior to logging in to my account just a few moments ago.

5 - Diluted Keyword Performance Metrics

According to Google:

Performance statistics: Aggregated performance statistics for automatic matching will appear in each ad group’s Keywords tab, in a line item labeled Automatic Matching Total.

Search Query Performance report: You can see the search queries that triggered your ads due to automatic matching by running a Search Query Performance report. The queries will be labeled Automatic in the Search Query Match Type column.

What this means is advertisers can’t even track the performance of their new, auto-added keywords on an individual basis. Google aggregates the new keywords as one channel and then allow advertisers to run a separate report to see what keyword terms actually are in that group.

For an innovative, “do no evil” company like Google, I simply can’t see how they can get out of this one without a pubic apology and some changes to the new Automatic Matching feature.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about the basics of utilizing both Paid and Organic Search in tandem to increase the overall return that advertisers get from this invaluable marketing channel. I hope that this overview will help those asking the question “what is search engine marketing?”, while providing some valuable insight for experienced marketers.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

From my perspective, SEM is basically two sub-channels focused on driving traffic from search engine results.

Organic (or “Natural”) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) focuses on gaining higher rankings for relevant terms utilizing the search engine’s proprietary algorithms. Last I read, about 70% of all clicks on a search engine results page are on the organic results. Having a clear SEO strategy and understanding of how each search engine’s algorithms weighs different factors to determine relevancy are essential when engaging in organic search engine optimization.

Paid Search focuses on paying for clicks resulting from self-written text ads which are displayed based on self-selected terms. Having control over the messaging in the text ads, the words that trigger ads and even the specific destination that visitors are sent when clicking on the ad make this channel extremely efficient for a saavy search marketer. (I’ll get into more detail on this in future posts)

Paid Search is often referred to as “SEM”, but given the figure below, I don’t buy into this misused acronym. There are also sub-channels within paid search when you go beyond the traditional search engine. Services like Yahoo’s Product Submit allow advertisers to display their product results in shopping engines on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. For the sake of simplicity and applicability to the widest audience, I will not focus on these additional paid channels which have a very specific function.

I hope that helps answer the basic question “what is search marketing?”. I’ll try to make future posts more in-depth to add value for those already familiar with SEM.

Next Search Engine Marketing Topic:
Determining Your SEM Strategy