Central Perk: What SEOs Must Learn from Adwords Folks

vineri, 14 octombrie 2011

What SEOs Must Learn from Adwords Folks

Posted: 14 Oct 2011 05:47 AM PDT

Posted by Fryed7

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

AdWords folks. They're the traders of the online marketing world. They spend their time analyzing scoreboards, making little improvements and brainstorming their next ideas. They split-test their ideas, scale the best and ditch the best. In a world where scarce resources force them to make choices over budget, positioning and copy, they're having to think totally differently to SEOs.

Rand posted back in 2008 about the disconnect between PPC spending and SEO spending. Despite the well documented differences in results, PPC is a science from the outset, but SEO still leaves lots to chance. AdWords folks live-and-die by the following five rules. Today, you're going to learn how to adopt them as an SEO and win:

Perry Marshall once said that advertising is "one of the world's most wasteful and deceptive industries" since results from campaigns are so difficult to track. In an online world with universally simple, yet sophisticated analytics available, it's a totally different ball-game.

Sure, you understand the concept of profit and yes it is the end goal, but not in the same way as AdWords folks where not making money is an unforgivable sin from the word go. SEO and Social Media agencies can still charge $5k for a campaign that may or may not affect the client's bottom line (spending is speculative), but an AdWords account manager can't spend $5 without being accountable for every penny. AdWords clients can see what money is being spent on, and the results - there's no excuse anymore.

We're in the business of making money; whilst SEOs can be accountable, PPC folks are always accountable. We need to emulate PPC guys.

You've used Google Analytics, but do you really know how to apply custom filters, advanced segmentation and setup tracking. Take Google's Conversion University course, take the exam and prove it to yourself.

Get yourself used to regular feedback. Computer games master this regular 'pat on the back' - get Geckoboard or some equivalent setup to feedback regular metrics that matter.

Pour through your Google Webmaster Tools, especially the 'Search queries' tab which gives similar statistics to what AdWords folks see on their dashboard.

Next up, rule #2...

PPC is still an investment - with each visitor (potential customer) you gain more and more user data. Direct marketers are conditioned to split-test mailings and harvest data to make continual improvements; AdWords and other PPC services make this even easier.

Tim Ferris used AdWords tests to name his book, 'The 4-Hour Workweek', knowing he'd get more 'instinctual' responses than the perhaps group-influenced results from a focus group (plus, AdWords is so much more scalable).

Yes, we spend our time doing tests, but we need to experiment like AdWords guys do as well, agonizing over their campaigns titles and numbers month on month. We don't talk about swipe files enough in SEO. When was the last time you tried editing and testing your title tags to improve your click-through rate?

Go through your bookmarks and draw together a list organized by factor of your favourite, most inspirational sites for improving your SEO. Rand's Head-to-Head Presentation from ProSEO Boston consisted of little more than showing off his awesome swipe file and his concept mashup.

Conversion rate optimizers put together awesome guides like this to help you on your website. Use the same tips and tactics to brainstorm and implement tests on your onpage SEO.

Rule #3 next...

Use words carefully.

In the business of signup forms, calls to action, headlines, sub-headlines, and AdWords advertising copy... few words make a huge impact. As well as being the most viewed pieces content, often the content that most influences your visitors.

Joshua Porter is an interface designer you need to be aware of. His advice - "The fastest way to improve your interface is to improve your copywriting" - applies just as much to your search campaign.

Start with these basics for understanding microcopy.

Look through all your title tags via SEOmoz PRO app or by downloading them with Xenu. Can you make them more relevant to your users? Can you add more trigger words?

Phew! The last-but-one rule...

SEO is like having an unlimited AdWords budget that harvests ~85% of the clicks from a given SERP, but that's a mixed blessing. Scarce resources, like a PPC budget force you to choose and optimize your input for maximum gain. Economics 101 in action.

Its like the difference between a funded startup and a bootstrapped startup. Jason Fried of 37signals explains the first thing a bootstrapped company has to do is turn a profit - or the owners go hungry - whereas the funded startup needs to spend the money first.

The PPC guy has to figure out and test where the money is, or they go hungry too...

Bad times. Picture via Declubz

Don't think of SEO as an unlimited AdWords budget, but as an expanded AdWords campaign. The profit discipline has still got to be there. Although SEO doesn't have direct costs-per-click, but it still is very expensive in terms of time. The trouble is it's too easy to spend time like you've got waiting on the results later. Don't.

37signals plan on 'what takes two weeks'. They expect results at the end of that. If something isn't possible in two weeks, the task is too big (cut it up instead) or focus on something that will deliver results. You need to watch this video like your next meal depends on it.

Apply some 80-20 analysis to your SEO spending (both time and money). Where's the most money coming from? So if I cancelled 80% of next month's SEO budget, would you still meet your numbers?

And finally...

"Revenue’s Vanity. Profit's Sanity." The same principles apply to search - traffic is vanity. Yes, it makes you feel good but you can't go to the bank with traffic figures. You only need highly-targeted visitors that convert into customers.

When you're paying for each visitor to your website, boy are you going to try to extract the most value from each visitor. Not every visitor is a "hot" lead, so gaining their permission to follow up is essential. AdWords guys recognize the power of opt-in landing pages and follow-up marketing.

Whilst landing pages used in a PPC campaign might not be the most linkable content, it is still important to build content that engages visitors in the prospecting process.

Brainstorm alternative methods to maximize the value of your current search traffic. How can you capture their email address, and lead them to a sale? Is the offer not right for them? How can you link in alternative offers?

Closing Thoughts

AdWords is not expensive search marketing. It's direct marketing on steroids, and direct marketers appear to be the smartest guys in the business. It's a no-brainer to study them and apply what they know to SEO. So I may have accidentally, on purpose, published my public to-do list for getting good at SEO. And it's not like enough homework has been set already...!

The beauty of SEO is it combines the creative, artistic side of marketing with the rigorous, science that is online marketing; what do you think? Is it worth peaking over the shoulders of our comrades in paid search?

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5 Tips for Running a Successful Retargeting Campaign - Whiteboard Friday

Posted: 13 Oct 2011 02:02 PM PDT

Posted by Aaron Wheeler

You've already got a lot of visitors coming to your site through your SEO efforts, but how many of those visitors convert on their first visit? If your site is like most sites, less than 5%. Those visitors that don't convert the first time around might come back to your site, but why not make the decision easier for them? Use retargeting! There are a lot of great reasons to implement a retargeting campaign and, in that vein, there are a lot of steps involved in doing so. On this week's Whiteboard Friday, our very own Justin Vanning explains some of the tips and strategies he's used to create successful retargeting campaigns. Are you a retargeting wizard yourself? Tell us about your own tricks in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Hey Mozzers, my name is Justin and I am pretty new here on the SEOmoz team. I work on the marketing team, and I'm responsible for all of our pay channels, so paid search, retargeting, pretty much anything that has a budget where we're trying to go and acquire new customers, that's what I work on.

So I'm going to take a little bit of a breather from SEO. I know most of our Whiteboard Fridays have to do with SEO. I have a paid search background, a paid marketing background, so I'm going to stick to retargeting since that's what I know and hopefully can show all of you who are doing SEO why it's valuable to use retargeting and give you some tips.

So for those of you who don't know what retargeting is, it's basically you serve a cookie, you serve a pixel on your site that's going to capture users who have visited it so that in the future when they're visiting different web properties, other websites, you can show your ads to those users because you know that they've actually been to a specific page on your site. So I'm not going to go too deep into what retargeting is or give some specifics on that because I think most people probably are aware of it. We've done a bunch of blog posts on it. I know Joanna wrote a bunch that if you're interested you can check out and you can kind of see the basics of retargeting. But what I want to focus on are just some five quick tips for running a successful retargeting campaign.

The first one is to create highly relevant audiences. In retargeting, your audience is basically the group of people that you are capturing through the use of serving them a cookie. You're capturing those users, and you're putting them in a segment or an audience. So here at SEOmoz we use AdRoll as our retargeting platform, and they're great if any of you guys want to check them out. But the first thing that AdRoll offers, and I know some other retargeting platforms offer, is segmenting and filtering. So what this means is that you have the retargeting pixel on your entire site. So if a user visits your product page or your features page, they're going to be served that cookie, but what segmenting and filtering does is it lets you take a group of people and say, "I want to only create an audience from people who have been to our features page. I only want to create an audience of people who have checked out . . ." Let's say you're a snowboard retailer, and you only want to grab people who have looked at winter coats. Well, you can use segmenting to grab those users and put them in a highly relevant bucket so that when you're serving them retargeting ads when they're out on different websites, you know exactly who that audience is and what the best ad is going to be that they're going to respond to.

So utilizing the segments and also utilizing filters to filter out people, like here at SEOmoz, we have Pro subscribers, so if I wanted to create an audience, I probably don't want to include our Pro subscribers in our retargeting campaign since they're already signed up. So I can use filtering to make sure that I'm filtering out anybody who's basically come to their login page or has gone to their Pro dashboard.

The second point is utilizing all of your web properties. So what this is talking about is if you have a company blog, you have multiple sites that basically maybe you have two sites that are offering two different product sets, make sure that you're using your retargeting pixel and you're creating audiences in segments on all of your web properties. So if you have a blog that gets 20,000 visitors a month, even though they might not all necessarily be prospective customers, it's a great idea to use that blog, throw the retargeting pixel up there, and start capturing that audience that in future if you decide that you want to give that audience a particular message through banner ads, you can serve that to them.

Then the third point under this is just to know your goals. Make sure that you know exactly what you're trying to do with your retargeting campaign. If you're trying to drive conversions, you want to make sure that your - what I'm going to speak about next in the conversion funnel - and make sure that you're keeping in mind what your conversion funnel is. If you're trying just to drive lead gen, to drive people signing up a form with information, make sure you know what that goal is of what you're doing. Maybe it's just brand awareness and staying in front of potential customers. So you can use retargeting to really do any of these different goals. It's just making sure you know what the goal is and structuring your campaign to meet that goal.

The second tip is to utilize your conversion funnel. Every site's going to have probably a slightly different conversion funnel, but the basic one is you have these different steps that the prospective customer's going to go though as they are going from first being exposed to your brand or to your site to finally making a purchase, whether that's signing up for software that they're going to pay a monthly fee for, or if it's purchasing a T- shirt. There are going to be different levels in that funnel, but for this scenario, we're just going to say the first one is the awareness stage. That's when a customer is just kind of being exposed to your brand. The way that you can utilize this in retargeting is to, say that somebody just landed on our homepage and they never went anywhere else on our site, well if I have a segment or an audience that's set up just for the homepage and it's filtering out everything else, I can say, "Let's serve these people ads with just our logo and our company name because that's going to reinforce that brand." It's going to reinforce the fact that they know they've been to your site. They might not yet know exactly what you do. They might not know your full product set, so you can keep these ads more simple and just focus them on brand awareness.

The second part of the conversion funnel is interest. This is somebody who's maybe looked around a little bit on your site. They've started looking at your product offerings. They've gotten a little bit more in depth into the conversion funnel. This is where if you're retargeting this specific audience, you would want to have ads with a specific product. So if somebody went to your - I keep bringing up snowboarding, but that's because I like to snowboarding - but if they were looking at actual snowboards, well then you could say, "In retargeting I want to serve them maybe ads that are going to talk about other snowboards that we offer." Or maybe we got a new line of snowboards in and you want to try to get that person to come back to your site, so you use that interest that you know that person has based on their behavior.

The next step would be evaluation. These are potential customers that are in the evaluation phase and they're looking. They've been to your site. They've done a lot of looking around at different products or your different services, and they are currently evaluating whether or not they're going to become a customer. So at this point you want to have retargeting ads that answer any of their lingering questions. So, good things here would be maybe to reinforce if you had won an award for your product and to reinforce that in your retargeting ads that are going after this audience. Maybe it's to talk about if you have a lifetime warrantee and none of your competitors do, at this point you would maybe want to bring that up in your retargeting ads.

The next step is the decision phase. That's when the customer is literally about to buy whatever the product or the service is that you're offering. Maybe they've made it to your cart page and they haven't actually converted into a purchase or a paying subscriber. So at this point you would want to serve these types of customers ads that show particular promos and discounts. Let's say your product normally is $99 a month, but you're going to run it for $79 a month. So it's a great way to go after that audience of people who have made it really far in the conversion funnel, but haven't converted, by creating ads that are speaking specifically to kind of that last step to get them over the hurdle of, "Should I become a customer or not?"

Then the final step is after somebody has purchased the product you want to . . . you can use targeting in some creative ways after the purchase to basically say, "Okay, this person purchased a snowboard. They didn't buy bindings or boots from our company. Let's serve them retargeting ads that have products that we know are similar to what they already bought and that we think they're going to have interest in, and try to use that purchase behavior to create the ads and create the retargeting campaign that's going to go after that specific segment.

The third tip is to avoid banner fatigue. In retargeting, if you set up a retargeting campaign and you're not careful, it's definitely easy to have it where your ads are literally just following people who have been to your site and they're following them from site to site to site. It can get a little creepy. People get weirded out by that. I know experts usually say that 7 to 12 ads per month is the ideal range that you want your banner ads to be showing up to people who are in your retargeting audiences. So whether you have to turn down the frequency of how often your ads are showing, if you want to cap your impressions to one per user per day, you can use some different things in most retargeting tools to make sure that you're not just bombarding people with banners ads. You don't want to create just the negative feeling that you're constantly following them or that you're desperate for a sale.

The other tip under here is to just rotate your creative constantly. I think having a portfolio of creative that is kind of a living, breathing portfolio of multiple creatives, between static, between animating. Like I said earlier is that people are going to be seeing these ads frequently, and you don't want them to keep seeing the exact same ad, or the exact same call to action, or the exact same offer. So I think rotating these ads constantly, whether you're doing different campaigns to hit customers at different points in the conversion funnel, making sure that you have multiple ads that can speak to exactly where that customer's at and where you want them to be in the conversion funnel.

The fourth tip would be optimizing your landing pages. As most of you know, from whether you're doing paid search, you're doing other channels that landing page optimization is crucial to making sure that if you show your ad to a potential customer and they click on it, that's the first step. You want to make sure that you have compelling creative to get them to click, but once they actually perform that click and they get to your site, you want to make sure that you're not losing them for a second time. Keeping in mind, all of these people who are in your retargeting audiences are usually going to be people who haven't made a purchase, unless you've going after this segment of people who did make a purchase and you're trying to get them to come back. For the most part you're going to be going after people who probably haven't purchased on their first visit to the site. So you want to make sure that your landing page is optimized to speak to them. If somebody's in the decision phase of the process, you know they've already been to your product or your features page. They have a lot of information. You don't want to drop them on your homepage. You don't want to drop them back on your "About Us" page when they're at that phase in the process. You want to make sure you're getting them to as few clicks as possible to the actual conversion point.

The other thing that I like to do is just to constantly test and make sure that you're using creative copy. There are things you can do where you can create your custom landing pages for your retargeting campaigns that thank the user for coming back. You know that they've already been to your site. So having the first thing they see, copy that says, "Thank you for taking for taking another look at our site. Thank you for taking a look at our products." Those types of things can be effective to give you that extra bump in conversions.

Then the fifth and final tip is to have patience and continually test. Retargeting is definitely more of a marathon than a race. If you set it up, you're really excited, you get your campaign up and running, you're probably going to be a little bit disheartened as soon as it gets up and running because it's slow to really build. Retargeting, it needs time. As your campaign is running, you're serving more impressions to the same users over and over. So you're reinforcing your brand, you're reinforcing your promotion, your offers, your products. The longer that your retargeting campaigns run, the more successful they're going to be. It doesn't mean you can set it up and just forget about it. You definitely have to test. Testing creative, testing offers, testing landing pages, all of those things are really important, and they're really simple to do if you're using a good retargeting platform where you can just do A/B testing. You can have a creative with your mascot versus a creative without your mascot. You can have creative that is strongly pushing a call to action to sign up for a free trial or to buy a product, or you can try to tone that language back and see which one performs better.

So I think at the end of the day if you're testing your ad copy, you're testing your creative, you're testing your landing pages and constantly building that data set of metrics to create what decisions you're going to make in the future, and you are constantly learning from the retargeting campaign, I think that's the most effective way to run retargeting.

So these are some of the tips that I've learned in previous jobs and here at SEOmoz, and will continue to learn moving forward. Retargeting is something that I think the more you do it, the more you can learn from it. So I don't think you'll ever get to a point where you feel like you're 100%, you know everything there is to know about retargeting, but it's a great channel to use. It really is the best way, I feel like, to get the customers that have been to your site, whether they've come there organically through SEO. You're spending all your time in SEO and you're driving traffic to your site. Why not use retargeting to try and go after that 95%, 97%, 98% of the people who get to your site and never actually convert on that first visit. Retargeting is a great way to let you go and stay in front of those people. When they're out surfing on the Web, doing things on the Web, you can stay in front of them and remind them of your brand, remind them of your products, and hopefully get them to come back.

That's all I have for you. I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me through email. My email is listed on the SEOmoz site. Thanks a lot, guys.