Thursday, June 23, 2011

Position Preference in Adwords

                                                                                           

Position preference is a feature in Adwords that allows advertisers to request that their ads are shown in a specified position for any given keyword. It is important to note that with position preference turned on, Google cannot guarantee that your ad will be shown in the preferred position 100% of the time.


Optimizing Your Keyword Ranks With Position Preference
Conversion rates can vary drastically across keyword rankings. By using the position preference option, advertisers that have identified a preferred (higher converting or more efficient) rank can set a preferential ranking in Google.

For example: if your product or service does not tend to generate an immediate conversion response, you may find that the #1 & #2 positions generate a high number of click-throughs but a relatively low number of conversions. This will undoubtedly lead to an increase in CPA. In this instance the advertiser may consider setting a position preference of (3 - 5). These settings would send a request for an ad-ranking (3-5) assuming that the ad meets auction requirements for those positions.

The key to effectively utilizing position preference lies in the advertiser’s ability to cross-reference conversion data. This can be achieved by either setting up Adwords Conversion Tracker, Google Analytics or a third party analytics solution. In the early stages of testing, advertisers should monitor their performance as it pertains to their original ad rankings. This should act as a benchmark, followed by testing ads at different ranking ranges.

How to Enable Position Preference

1. Login to your Adwords account.
2. On the Campaign Summary page, select the box to the left of any campaigns you want to enable for position preference.
3. Click Edit Settings.
4. Find the Networks and bidding section.
5. Under Options, select the box next to 'Position preferences.'
6. Click Save Changes.

What Are The Position Preference Options?
There is a wide range of position preference options in Adwords.
- Higher than a given position (such as above 7)
- Lower than a given position (such as below 4)
- Within a range of positions (such as from 2 - 8)
- In a single exact position (such as position 2)

Does Position Preference Always Work?

The short answer is no, the top limit cannot be guaranteed, "...if there are 10 people with position preference turned on, and their top position is all 4, then if Google followed that ad serving plan, there would be 0 ads as no one wanted the top 3 spots. The bottom limit of position preference is a hard limit - the upper limit might not be."

While this example is an extreme case, it highlights the point that position preference allows advertisers to set a preferred position and that said position cannot be guaranteed.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

How to Improve Your International SEM Strategy


Search marketing accounts for the largest share of online ad spending by a long shot. eMarketer predicts that it will continue to dominate in coming years.
As a result, it is important to understand how your business can benefit from search marketing. The vast majority of online searches are in languages other than English; therefore, it’s important to understand how to approach search campaigns when dealing with international markets.
Let see with 10 search experts about how marketers can improve their international search engine marketing (SEM) strategies. I have outlined the top 13 tips here. Join the conversation by adding your international SEM tips in the comments below.

1. Go Local with Keyword Research


Machine translation is not an option when it comes to creating international keyword lists. Independent SEO Strategist Joost de Valk says, “Talk to native people or preferably native search marketers and get the real keywords for your business in that country. Far too often do I encounter people blatantly translating keywords from one language to another, thinking that a translation agency will know what it’s doing. They don’t. You need someone who has grown up in the country you’re targeting, speaking its language.”
“If you can hire a local SEM firm or at least [one] on the same continent, you’ll have the advantage of language support, understanding of culture, etc.,” says Adrian Salamunovic, co-founder of art company DNA11, which sells its product in more than 50 countries. “Keyword research and proper ad copy often come down to well-written copy and understanding of ‘soft factors,’ such as nuances in language and culture.”
Christian Arno, founder and managing director of UK translation company Lingo24, suggests to conduct separate research campaigns for countries that share a language. “You will find differences in the way Germans and Austrians, or Mexicans and Argentinians, search,” he explains. “These are often cultural, and peculiar to searching habits, in addition to known linguistic differences.”
Furthermore, Arno notes that “there are often several ways of translating — or indeed localizing — a key phrase.” Accordingly, he recommends that marketers create broad keyword lists. “Instruct your foreign language Internet marketers to give you all the options they think might work in your local market. Then test, test, test and let your analytics data decide. It’s often not a translator’s favorite rendition which works best in the long run, and if you can generate ROI from a broader basket of search terms than your competitors, so much the better.”

2. Do Test English


Running international search campaigns doesn’t mean excluding English completely.
“In some foreign language markets — generally those where English is commonly spoken — it can be worthwhile running campaigns in English as well as the native language,” says Arno. “Make sure to run them separately as the English which works in one locale may be different to others.”

3. Look Out for Language Mash-ups


“Sometimes English terms make it into another language and supplant the ‘correct’ original native use of a particular phrase,” says Arno. “For example, in Italy, a top search phrase for travel sites is ‘voli [flights] low cost’ rather than ‘voli a basso prezzo’ as you’d expect. This phenomenon should come out in your keyword research, but you might want to give it as an example to your foreign language Internet marketers to make sure they know you’re onto it.”

4. Capitalize on Local Holidays


Explore additional opportunities during local holidays,” says Ting Ting Wang Jager, senior manager of paid media at search marketing firm Covario. “Because April is traditionally when students start the school year and new recruits enter the labor force in Japan, a smart SEM practitioner would weave this renew/refresh message into existing ad copy.”

5. Advertise on Local Search Engines and Social Sites





Baidu has a 75.8% share of China’s search engine market. Google is a distant second with a 19.2% share.
“Google rules, but not everywhere,” says Bas van den Beld, search and social strategist and founder of blog State of Search. “There are a few countries in which Google gets beaten by local search engines. Think of Seznam in the Czech Republic and Yandex in Russia. Keep these local search engines in mind; it might give you more traffic and more conversion in those countries.”
“Facebook and local social networks also are important places to advertise,” says van den Beld. “Same goes for advertising on YouTube. Check who watches a lot of video (I know the Dutch do) and target those. Not just on YouTube, but also in SERPs [search engine results pages] which have universal [search] results withvideos. So, check the SERPs to see where your ad can stand out.”
When it comes to social networks, look outside of the top English-focused social sites for local insights as well. You may find that local sites are even more highly trafficked than the mainstays that seem ever so pervasive in the United States and UK. “YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China,” says Wang Jager, “However, you can still generate and capture buzz in this largest Internet-using country by utilizing RenRen, Tudou, Youku and Sina Weibo.”
Liz Elting, co-founder and co-CEO of translation company TransPerfect, cautions against assuming that international search engines and social sites work similarly to your local counterparts. “No two search engines use the exact same algorithm.” she says. “The optimization techniques required for the Chinese search engine Baidu, for example, may be vastly different from those needed to optimize for Google. Businesses that want to reach targeted users need expertise not only in language, but also in culture and technology.”

6. Make Every Character Count


“Most search engines limit the number of characters you can use on each line of your PPC ad,” says Elting. “Unfortunately, if you try to translate an English ad, the resulting translation will likely exceed the limitations imposed by the search engine because the number of words and length of the words are often longer in other languages. Therefore, it is important that the adapted ad is edited to fit within the character length limitations, without sacrificing the message you are trying to communicate.”

7. Don’t Compete Against Your Local Team


“Make sure you are not ‘doubling up’ with the local country marketing team, says Lisa Myers, CEO of SEO agency Verve Search. “I’ve seen numerous occasions where a company is bidding against themselves. For example, an agency is hired to do the SEM internationally but then the local offices in each country are still doing their ‘own’ campaigns. This is obviously a waste of time and money. But don’t discourage the local marketing teams — they are a huge asset. After all, they speak the language.”

8. Don’t Overbid on Keywords


“In other languages, there’s often less competition doing international search,” says Ben Kirshner, CEO of search engine marketing agency Elite SEM. “You don’t need to bid the same amount as you would in the U.S. and as a result, you can save a substantial amount of money for your client by bidding less on different inventory.”
“There are a number of competitive research tools that are free and can point marketers in the right direction when determining bids for international SEM campaigns,” Kirshner explains. “For example,Google Keyword Tool offers real data on traffic estimates and helps expand your keywords (as long as you have a Google AdWords account). Another tool that I like to keep under my international SEM belt is Google Traffic Estimator. This goes one step further from Google Keyword Tool and suggests CPC (cost-per-click) rates, local monthly searches and more.”
Kirshner continues, “One of the most insightful bidding tools out there, in my opinion, is Google Global Market Finder. Using this tool, marketers can type in a keyword like ‘hard drive’ and select a territory or region such as South Korea. What you get back is a geographical distribution of locations that have enough volume estimates associated with that keyword and suggested bids based on this data.”
“Not to sound old-fashioned,” Kirshner says, “but there’s also a non-techie resource that is just as (if not more) helpful in setting your bid prices: Google reps. They can pull Query Visualization Reports, which will identify similar keywords and their bid prices in the U.S. versus how they are performing in other countries like South Korea, Portugal and India. The added value component of these reports comes in the form of competitive analysis on what other competitors are bidding on and whether their bids are increasing or decreasing.”
Kirshner also suggests checking out more in-depth tools that, of course, come at a cost: SEM Rush, Ad Guru, SpyFu and Compete are subscription-based models that help marketers set their bid rates.

9. Use SEO Techniques to Research Competitor SEM Strategies


Any search marketing campaign should be enriched by a healthy amount of competitive research. Myers believes that researching for international campaigns may be even more important though, as competitors may have already done local research and testing from which your business can benefit. She explains:
“You can learn a lot from what your competitors are doing and, although you can’t really know what keywords they are bidding for in their paid search campaigns, you can find out what keywords they target for organic/natural search by having a quick look at their title attributes and page content. The keywords that they target organically will often be the keywords that generate the most traffic as well.”

10. Define Your Success Criteria


“In order to determine whether or not a campaign is successful, you must define your goals,” says Elting. “Are you trying to lower your cost per action? Are you trying to lower your cost per click? How are you defining a conversion? Do you want more people to submit a quote request? Make sure you have defined goals in advance of your campaign to prove that what you are doing is valuable.”

11. Make Conversion Easy on the Landing Page





“If your goals have anything to do with a conversion (and they should), then you need to do everything in your power to make a conversion easy for your visitors,” says Elting. “On the landing page, you should give the customer the opportunity to register, get a quote, contact you or make a purchase. The easier you can make it for a visitor to convert, the greater the likelihood that you will have success with your international search engine marketing campaigns.”
Furthermore, Myers insists, “Don’t fall in the trap of cutting corners and using the ‘one size fits all’ sentiment when it comes to landing pages. The temptation to use the .com domain for all countries just because they understand English is not good enough, at least not if you want conversions. Invest in translators or, even better, use search professionals in the relevant country you are targeting to create landing pages for your paid search traffic.”
Alyssa Paris, marketing manager for international translation and localization company Acclaro, provided more food for thought regarding landing pages: “Localize your landing pages with the target culture in mind, taking into account different payment options, legal restrictions and communication conventions.”
Salamunovic says “If you can’t afford translation services or full-blown translated sites, the next best thing is geo-landing pages — for inspiration, take a look at how LivingSocial customizes their offer pages (visually) for each city.”

12. Test, Test, Test


“For SEM, the same thing holds true in North America as anywhere else,” says Kyle Peterson, senior global account manager for PR and marketing firm Clement Communications. “You can’t write one ad and hope it sticks. You need to be testing and writing copy on a continuous basis to find out which headlines, words, calls-to-action, etc. resonate better with the audience in your newly targeted country. Again, it goes back to language: a native speaker is necessary to effectively test different writing styles.”
Think local when choosing analytics tools, suggests Paris: “Select the appropriate market-specific analytics tool to track your progress. Don’t compare results across countries, but rather, analyze your relative progress within each locale.”
Kirshner suggests asking your translation agency to make you a translation guide, or “cheat sheet,” so that you understand what you’re looking at in terms of ad groups and can optimize keywords that aren’t performing well.

13. Crowdsource Keywords


“Make sure you’re asking your users and other in-country contacts for more terms,” says Arno. “Use feedback forms to ask users how they think their friends would search for your product or service. We use our own survey form when clients have used our service to ask this, among other questions, and advise clients to do so. Often you only see these forms if you’ve actually used a service.”
I asked Arno if he had seen any dramatic improvements from using crowdsourced keywords. He explained, “We get the odd phrase, which proves useful over time. It doesn’t transform our business, but like lots of the other steps we take, it incrementally adds to it — and all the little things add up!”

Russia: Advertising on Yandex

In Russia over 46 million people used the Internet in 2010 comprising 33% of the total population according to Euromonitor which defines internet users as those using the internet from any device (including mobile phones) in the past 12 months and generally covers users between the age of 15-74. The Internet is a powerful channel in Russia for advertising goods and services while promoting your brand or reaching your end buyer via contextual advertising.

Yandex, a Russian search engine (also operating in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan) has a average search market share for 2010 of 64%.
Yandex offers advertisers a sophisticated service for placing text ads on both its search result pages and millions of pages on its advertising network, in total showing ads to over 30 million people daily. The Yandex.Direct Advertising Network covers various business spheres, from construction to banking, and diverse areas of interest. Yandex.Direct allows for targeting by location (down to city level) and by timing for ad exposure, along with thematic and behavioral targeting on partner sites.
Yandex also offers display ad placement on the pages of its most popular services, such as Mail, News, Weather, Traffic, Market etc, as well as on the Home Page - a single placement that will bring you 13 million unique views daily!
Yandex has English-speaking professionals who can advise you on the most effective campaign strategy for your business and help you set-up the process that brings potential customers to your site. An English-language log-in system is available that lets you monitor the campaign in real time. It enables you to track visitors, expenditure and set up goals.
Online campaigns with Yandex are perfect for a sales-push to a specific audience or for company branding. If you are looking to make boost your sales and company recognition in Russia, Yandex is the answer!

Friday, March 11, 2011

HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI

84% of social media programs don’t measure return on investment (ROI). The comments in that post indicated that a lot of individuals and businesses want to be able to measure the ROI of their social media strategies and campaigns, but they don’t know where to start.

Companies and executives are finally beginning to really jump on the social media bandwagon, and that’s fantastic. However, for social media to fully work (for everyone), businesses and brands need to be able to evaluate the impact their social media use is having, both positive and negative. Measuring social media ROI isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult because many of the pieces that need to be evaluated are difficult to track. This guide is designed to help you track down those pieces and determine the ROI you’re getting on social media.

Defining Clear Goals

As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.

Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.

Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.
Metrics Tools





Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.

The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.

Back in January, we did a round-up of 50+ Tools for Measuring Web Traffic. Here are some of our favorites and some additional social media related measuring options:

Google Analytics — It’s free and it can provide a really powerful baseline for a variety of different factors. You can track incoming links and then the activities of the users they send, which can be helpful.

Omniture — Omniture has a slew of services available for businesses, including components that track Facebook and Twitter metrics.

TweetMeme Analytics — This is useful if you use TweetMeme’s retweet buttons on your sites. It’s a lot like Google Analytics, but focused on TweetMeme.

PostRank Analytics — This suite of tools measures social engagement on other platforms and services. What’s nice about PostRank is that instead of just a raw number, you can actually see the messages and comments from other sites that contribute to your stats. This can be really important for sentiment analysis (more on that later).

HootSuite — HootSuite is a great Twitter manager but also offers impressive analytics. The nice thing about the click data you get from an app like HootSuite (or bit.ly) is by looking deeper you can more easily see if those clicks translate into transactions or impressions on your other sites.

Be sure to check out our post on Tracking Social Media Analytics for help with these tools and for the type of data you want to look for. Also check out some other reasons to use a URL shortener.
Sentiment Analysis






Having a metric for something like Twitter mentions is pretty meaningless if you don’t know if those mentions are positive or negative. This is where sentiment analysis is interesting. Sentiment is also a useful baseline to look at before implementing or changing a social media strategy and calculating your ROI.

We’ve written a lot about different sentiment analysis tools for Twitter and here are some highlights:

Viral Heat — Viral Heat is an affordable social media monitoring service that includes a sentiment breakdown for Twitter mentions.

Twendz — Twendz is a very basic real-time Twitter sentiments tool.

Tweet Feel — Tweet Feel is another real-time Twitter sentiments search-engine.

Crimson Hexagon — Crimson Hexagon is an Enterprise-level social media tracking tool. The algorithm they use for their VoxTrot Opinion Monitor is really impressive stuff, and will help you determine what consumer sentiment is toward your brand based on social media mentions.

Sentiment Metrics — Sentiment Metrics is another tool aimed at enterprises or larger businesses. We mentioned them in our round-up of reputation tracking tools last year.
Social Media Product Suites





These products can be extremely useful in measuring ROI on social networks but are primarily designed for bigger brands and corporations. Still, in terms of all-encompassing tool sets, these tools have the edge.

Vitrue SRM — We’ve covered the Twitter Pages component of Vitrue SRM (Social Relationship Manager) before, but the whole suite is really dedicated to managing and getting the most information out of your social media accounts. Vitrue does analytics for links posted on Twitter or Facebook and can also plug into third-party services like Omniture and Google Analytics. Vitrue SRM is basically a CMS for controlling and monitoring your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

ContextOptional — ContextOptional offers both a Social Reporting Dashboard for monitoring engagement and activity and a Social Moderation Console for Facebook.

Salesforce.com — Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 line of products is really designed to integrate Twitter and Facebook results and pages directly into a company’s CRM. Although this isn’t ROI in the most clear-cut terms, by improving customer service and getting a handle on problems quickly, brands can save themselves from potentially costly mistakes. Those savings can be taken into account when computing your ROI.
Making the Data Usable

This is the hard part. After you have defined your baseline, you need to take the metrics from your monitoring tools and see how they correlate to higher sales, better customer retention, or whatever your primary markers for output are.

If your ultimate measurement is sales for instance, look at your sales level. If it has increased, look at the number of referrers on your e-commerce site (assuming you can track this data) from your website or Twitter or the number of coupons used that were given away in a Facebook campaign to start calculating which sales stemmed from your social media campaigns.

Do you see any trends? Is traffic up to your store after posting on Facebook? What about Twitter? Does store traffic correlate with more sales when evaluating that same data? Does a higher sentiment analysis on Twitter lead to more sales or more visits?

Finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI.
What do you think?

What do you use when measuring social media ROI? Is ROI the best term for measuring impact of social media, or should something else be used? What have you found to be good indicators of things that work and don’t work when using social media?
Blog Directory Submit my blog Marketing