• A vast array of technologies and trends are transforming online marketing, including the death of the click through. Advertisers and publishers have been predicting—and hoping for—the death of the click-through rate for years, complaining it’s a highly inefficient way to measure an ad’s success, especially for brand advertising.
• The merging of mobile and desktop. The dividing line between mobile devices (especially tablets) and desktop/laptop computers seems to be blurring. Apple, for example, has been incorporating features from its smartphones into its desktop operating system, and Jefferies & Co. predicted recently that Apple’s two systems—OSX and iOS—will merge completely.
• The persistence of supercookies. Researchers have found that major websites—specifically Hulu and MSN.com—have been following visitors with a file called a “supercookie,” which continues its tracking even after users delete it in their Web browsers. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t go over well with consumers. When called out, Microsoft and Hulu apologized and claimed to stop the practice. Don’t look for them to disappear completely, though—supercookies are legal.
• The rise of HTML5. Once a dominant format on the Web, Adobe’s Flash has struggled to stay relevant, especially after Apple declined to support the format on the iPhone and iPad. Publishers and advertisers have shifted their attention to the newer, more mobile-compatible technology, HTML5.
• http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/trends-digital-advertising-135805

Google nixes Buzz, Jaiku, iGoogle social features, Google Labs

• Google on Friday announced that it is scrapping another handful of products as the tech giant continues to trim down its product line and focus more on successes such as Android and Google+.
• The most notable of the products getting nixed this time around might be Google Buzz, the company’s failed attempt to release a social networking product in the vein of Twitter. Buzz is notorious for being a major privacy stumble for Google that ended in a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, which brought tough online data protection terms after a big backlash from users and privacy groups.
• This also means pulling the plug on Google Labs later this year — a website that allows the public to test experimental new projects and was the birthplace of hit Google products such as Google News, Google Maps and Google Trends.
• http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/10/google-nixes-buzz-code-search-jaiku-igoogle-social-features.html

Google AdWords Redesign Looks Beyond Keywords

• Google is about to take what it calls “a whole new approach” to search advertising, the foundation of its massive revenues.
• The AdWords program has always been designed around “keywords, keywords, keywords,” said product management director Baris Gultekin. And that isn’t changing, exactly, but Google is announcing an alternative, which it calls Dynamic Search Ads.
• With the new product, advertisers just point AdWords toward the pages that they want to promote. Then Google matches the ad with the best searches and generates an appropriate headline. “We are basically redesigning AdWords from the ground up,” Gultekin said. Under the hood, he said that Google is “flipping the search engine on its head.” Instead of taking a keyword and finding relevant pages, the company is taking a page and matching it to the best keyword.

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/google-adwords-redesign-looks-beyond-keywords-135950

So with simple, instant worldwide communication, it’s not really possible for markets to engage in “stand-alone” campaigns anymore. All campaigns live in a world of interconnected media, where TV personalities reference Twitter feeds and where consumers can easily build their personalized news sources. Accordingly, Paid Search doesn’t stand alone. The most popular method of Paid Search, Pay-Per-Click, is a valuable tactic that both feeds off of and drives intricate and interrelated marketing campaigns.

So in what ways can you utilize Pay-Per-Click to actually enhance your other marketing and public relations objectives and campaigns? Here are a few examples:

1. Public Relations

If you have a background in Public Relations, you know that one of the most popular defenses for Crisis Communication is a good offense. If you are a larger corporation and there is a crisis (think last year’s BP Oil leak), if you can get to the media and public first, you have the one-time opportunity to create perception. In marketing, perception is simple to create and very difficult to shift or change once it’s created. So if you have an Oil Leak and you know consumers are going to be searching in Google for news about “Gulf Oil Spill”, what do you do? Well you can let them find other websites with whatever media news is hot that minute, or you can setup a Pay-Per-Click campaign immediately and drive people to “Official BP News Page for The Gulf Oil Leak”. While it seems counterintuitive to bring consumers to a page where you are actually acknowledging the problem and discussing it, you get the opportunity to shift their perception and explain the situation, before other potentially far worse conclusions are drawn. So did BP spend? Yes, yes they did. In July 2010 (just after the height of the Oil Spill) an internal Google document was leaked. It showed that BP increased their PPC spend from nearly nonexistent to a whopping $3.59 Million dollars in June 2010 during the spill.
Perhaps you watched the superbowl and you saw Groupon create a bit of a stir with their socially incorrect commercials. Well, this would have been a great opportunity to run a comprehensive campaign showing consumers that they actually are a massive supporter of social charities, yet most people left February with a bad taste in their mouth about Groupon to the tune of roughly a 10% average increase in negative sentiment.

2. Impression Capture

When you spend millions of dollars to run a superbowl commercial, shouldn’t you make ever good-faith effort to maximize that investment? Of course. A simple, yet underused method is to make sure that anyone who sees your commercial but doesn’t remember your exact URL, is driven to your website. You could setup a large PPC campaign capturing every keyword related to your brand, product and services, for the 24-72 hours following the commercial airing, drive people to a unique place on your website reminding them about the benefits they remember from your commercial. Even better, extend the excitement the consumer feels by offering a continued experience, or build some mystery in your commercial and guide people via PPC search ads to a place where they can explore your brand and answer the mystery offered in the commercial.
The same techniques apply to radio campaigns, of course, since consumers are again trying to remember something, anything, about your brand that will help them find you later. Magazines are a bit more portable, so it’s easier to bring them with you and type in the URL exactly, but how many times are people reading on the go, and only remember something a few days or a week down the road, and then search to find the provider? I’ve done it, you’ve done it. Don’t let that impression go to waste by not following through.

3. Brand Association

Let’s imagine I’m the marketing director for a company that sells aftermarket car seats. And I’m not talking the kind your newborn sits in, I’m talking suede, hand stitched custom luxury seats with an under-seat air conditioning system built in. Do people search for these seats? Maybe a few, but not many. But do people search for Mercedes, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Bugatti and Porsche? Of course they do – by the tens of thousands. How many of these people might be interested in after-market custom seats curing the horrible “thigh-stick-to-seat” condition found in hot climates like my home state of Arizona? Probably more than one, and likely, associating your brand with related luxury brands, offers you a way to cheaply build some brand cache of your own, while hopefully garnering a few new customers along the way.

These are just a few concepts, but there are dozens of other creative ways to utilize Pay-Per-Click marketing to assist, rather than degrade your more traditional marketing and public relations tactics.

Remember, in a world where you can text your sister from central park in NYC, to find out how she is liking that amazing (and scary) live Sushi experience she’s having while on vacation in Japan, and in mid-conversation she asks you why your friend Tony would check-in to Starbucks on Bryant street (in downtown San Francisco), when The Coffee Bar is right next door on Mariposa St. and it’s clearly “way better”…well, communication and media are fast. As a marketer, you’ll truly only get one good chance to control an entire stream of exploration, research and consumption by your target consumer. If you mess it up, yeah you can try again, but it’ll be harder, less effective and more expensive next time.

Feeling talkative? Great! Let us know what other creative uses you’ve employed over the years.

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Note: I originally wrote this article for our good friends over at Agencyside @agencyside.

Click to: Download 11 Successful Social Media Case Studies

Q: What is Bing?
A: Bing is Microsoft’s recently re-branded search platform. Microsoft calls it a “decision engine”, rather than a search engine. Although, it’s really still a search engine. Micosoft used “Live.com” as their search platform in the past, but now you will notice, live.com redirects to Bing.com.

Q: Does MSN search use “Bing Technology”?
A: Yes, MSN search actually uses the Bing search algorithm, and actually drops the searcher into a Bing results page. So no, you do not need to optimize for MSN any differently than Bing.

Q: What will change with the Yahoo!/Microsoft search partnership?
A: The Yahoo search infrastructure will be controlled by Microsoft in mid-2010. Until then, both engines will likely operate independently. At that point, there will finally be a pretty serious competitor for Google. So you can rest assured Google is working on some fairly clever things to try and differentiate itself even more by that point.

Q: What are the major changes in Bing?
A: A variety of changes/additions have taken place. Primarily smarter search functionality provides more “rich” results, including more images and better localization with the enhanced map platform. Also notice the specialized channels for things such as travel, which provide quite robust shopping comparison options. Finally, there is much more integration with other MSN and Non-MSN platforms. Do a search for a sports celebrity and see what I mean with Fox Sports stats integration. Or try a celebrity that “tweets” often and see the link to his or her Twitter profile above all of the search results.

Q: Is the advertiser cash-back program still available for e-commerce?
A: Yes, it’s still available. There are some criteria to apply and the process isn’t that easy, but it does provide a solid ROI option since it’s a CPA (cost-per-action) model. You’ll need to be able to maintain your datafeed, be based in the US and meet a few other criteria in order to apply.

Q: What major changes should be made for optimization?
A: We’re working on tests to reverse engineer the elements of primary importance in the Bing ranking algorithm. Here are a few hints (we can’t give out all of them to our competitors, now can we) about what we have found the Bing ranking algorithm likes:

• Bing likes older domains, plain and simple. bad news for new domains, good news for older ones.
• Bing likes content (more like it’s bigger rival). More than 300 to 350 words per page has a very positive effect.
• Bing likes bulleted lists and descriptive word strings, but use subtle optimization.
• Bing likes optimized page titles, and page specific metadata, more than it’s bigger arch-rival.
• Bing likes fresh content. a lot.
• Bing likes relevant outgoing links more than past versions. and incoming links more than past versions as well.
• Bing likes “personal” information. It’s a unique option for certain optimization tactics.
• Bing doesn’t crawl deeper pages as well as Googlebot. XML sitemaps will help.
• Bing doesn’t like pages with an optimization ratio above 3.5% to 4% very much (at least the way Lucid calculates our optimization ratios).
• Bing doesn’t seem to care much about sloppy code.

This past December, I was visiting my family for Christmas and my mother asks me “how do I get on facebook?” I quickly replied back “Mom, you don’t.” Perhaps for selfish reasons. I really didn’t know what to say. Here I am, approaching 30, and have been on myspace and facebook for quite a few years. What were once safe harbors for your college party pics and funny comments between friends, has now become a hub for your entire online life, viewable by every friend and family member alike. And the baby-boomers like my parents, they want in on the action too.

The reality of this adoption didn’t hit me personally until this week when I had different friends say their parents where on facebook. I quickly replied back, “so is my mom”. Being in the online marketing business I started to think more about it. I thought about the people that have “added me” as a friend in the last 6 months:

• My Mom
• Two of my Aunts
• My great Aunt
• My second & third cousins
• My older brother
• My older sister

I think it’s safe to say Social Media is not a “fad” and is probably here to spoil the online photo posting for high school and college students everywhere for generations to come. But also, giving us an unprecedented “in” with the boomer-generation that has been historically tougher to reach online.

How about you? Has your parents added you on facebook yet? If not, beware because it will happen sooner than you might think.

Here is an interesting article I came across today by Jennifer Martinez; an industry author on Online Marketing.

http://gigaom.com/2009/08/25/the-social-web-isnt-just-for-the-young-anymore/

-The results seem to come faster – almost 2x as fast as in the current Google search, although since there are no ads on the test version, it’s hardly a fair comparison
-There seem to be less images included in the new results
-More reliance on keyword “strings” rather than stand alone keywords
-More focus on off-page optimization elements

Here is “Caffeine” (top) and the current Google results page (bottom).

Here’s an interesting article with a bit more information.

But, some things have not changed…I still get emails from email addresses like “bobjsalquitz@seo-blast-top-ranking.ru” all the time asking if I am missing the boat because my business is not on “the tops of the search engines. guaranteed number 1 ranking. beat Google with secrets of code…”

And the crazy part is that this has been going on for at least 5 years. Look at this article from 2004: Internet Advancement told to refund clients
That illustrates a fine on a firm out of Seattle that was making false promises about “Top Search Engine Positions”. And yet, I still get emails from clients, friends and associates asking me about emails from random people promising the world, or at least top rankings in the world, for $39/year. I guess some things never change.

I had a discussion with one of the Lucid partners about 2 months ago and we both came to the same conclusion…the recession is forcing businesses to take a hard look at their marketing dollars. Many are realizing that they are not getting the return on investment from Radio, Print and TV. Internet marketing is often much more efficient, and is the preferred method of finding a business by most consumers and businesses.

Having worked in print advertising in the past, I can tell you from personal experience that the newspaper industry has been a slowly dying industry for the past decade as they have searched for ways to prove their worth in a time when most people aren’t really interested in the products they provide. They have tried making up for their print ad rates by selling online ads but it seems as if they are suffering in this arena as well. The more businesses decide to online market them selves, control their own message and not get over charged and under delivered for a newspaper print ad the more this trend will continue.

Here is a quick link to an article with the current Q1 Online News Ad Revenues: http://www.clickz.com/3633951

Are you still wasting money in the Yellow Pages, Print, TV or Billboard advertising? You may want to take a serious look at how much return you are getting with these avenues and how much wasted money is spent on overhead like printing the paper or producing your TV commercial. Online marketing is an effective way to stay ahead of your competitors and make sure your business is running as smoothly as possible.

Let me know your thoughts!

Ken

Here is an interesting link that gives you some food for thought. I highly doubt that we will ever get to this point but they do make a few interesting points.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,518405,00.html