Paid search (pay-per-click) advertising is big. And it’s getting bigger. Its bigger than radio advertising, outdoor advertising and cinema advertising. By 2016 paid search advertising is expected to grow 75% and become a $61.1 billion industry. Check out this infographic:

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Source: The Future of Paid Search Infographic

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I enjoy social networking. However, social networking the Facebook way is not as enjoyable as it used to be. I’m more concerned about who’s seeing my updates and as a result carefully watch what I say. As a result I post less frequently and when I do post I’m very selective about what I post. For me the megaphone broadcast method of the news feed on Facebook is a major negative.  But I’ve also made this decision to become less social because I want to be polite to those I follow and those that follow me. I don’t want to clutter my relatives news feed with boring Internet marketing related articles and I don’t want to clutter my associates news feed with pictures of my little children.

This problem bothered me from the very early days. Thinking that Facebook woudl one day take care of this I started grouping my contacts. When ever I make a connection I add them to a particular group. However, Facebook doesn’t allow me to easily leverage this work I’ve done (I know there is a very cumbersome way to accomplish this). Plus I’m one of the few doing this and I can’t expect the content I post to select groups to remain within that circle. So, even though I’ve done the work of grouping my contacts I’m frustrated that I can’t do anything with it.

It is for this exact reason that I like the circles offered by Google+. It solves the social noise problem and allows me to socialize online the way I socialize offline within distinct groups.  This is one of the reasons I like Google+ but in short order here are other benefits I see:

1. Cleans up the newsfeeds
2. Addresses privacy concerns
3. Consolidates social networking
4. Impressive ancillary features

Not all of Googles recent projects have been successful, however I do think that Google+ offers a series of improvements to social networking that will make it a strong com

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The Tags feature on Google Places inserted a yellow tag next to your Places listing on search results (see image). It cost $25 for this feature and when I tried it under a free trial I found it to be pretty useless.  For the $25 your paid for this feature you really didn’t get anything in return. Tags didn’t improve your ranking in local listings nor did it improve your visibility any other way. Other than hoping for more clicks, there was no other tangible benefit that I could see.

To be fair there was reason to hope for more clicks, but the clutter that Googles search results pages are turning into – that’s a pretty distant hope.  When I compared the stats from the month prior to using this feature against the month when I did use it, I found no difference. So, after a one month trail I stopped using Google Tags. I’m assuming enough people felt this way because I just received this in my inbox:

Google Tags to be retired on 4/29

Dear Google Places user,

At Google, we’re always working to innovate and improve ways for small businesses to get online and reach more customers. At times, though, we have to decide where to focus our efforts and which technologies we expect will yield the most benefit to users and businesses like you in the long run.

In that spirit, we are retiring Google Tags for all users on April 29, 2011. No action is required on your part, and your Places account and listing will continue to work as usual. Effective today, no new tags can be created, but all active tags will keep running to the end of April for free.

In your Places account, you’ll be able to see billing history until July 31st. If your tag is active, performance data will be available from now until May 31st. Historical performance data of inactive tags will be available in your dashboard starting May 2nd until May 31st.

You can visit our blog post and our Help Center for more information. There are still a number of options for you to reach more customers online, including our latest product for local businesses, Google Boost. Through the month of May, we are offering Tags customers like you $100 to try out Google Boost. Call 877-503-0841 Monday to Friday 8am-6pm to redeem your credit.

Thank you for trying Google Tags.

Sincerely,

The Google Places Team

Is anyone complaining about this? Your thoughts?

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Image via Wikipedia

The position preference in AdWords allowed you to target a specific range of ad positions for your keywords. This means you could set a bid price and target positions 3 to 5 for instance for a particular keyword. I have found this feature to be somewhat useful because experimenting with ad position is a fundamental part of optimizing your search campaign.  Also, targeting a range allowed me to categorize words and better understand performance based on position. And being able to position preference helped set a particular goal and optimize accordingly.

However, Google economists (who study this stuff for a living) feel that this feature is not that very helpful in optimizing a campaign. So, this feature is getting a boot.  Here is the announcement:

More specifically, you can expect to see the following changes in your account:

As of today, April 5th, position preference can no longer be enabled for campaigns through either the AdWords web interface or the API. Campaigns already using position preference will still have it enabled, but if you turn position preference off in one of your campaigns, you won’t be able to turn it back on.

Starting in early May, we’ll begin disabling position preference for any campaigns still using it.

After you disable position preference (either manually or when the feature is retired starting in early May), the manual maximum CPC bids for those campaigns will be the bids position preference used most recently. Position preference tries to raise or lower your bids to target the positions you specify. So using the most recent position preference bid as your manual maximum CPC should minimize disruption to your traffic.

So, bye bye position preference.  You were nice but apparently did not deliver the goods!

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I consume all of my blog content through Google Reader. If you asked me what the homepages of some of my favorite blogs look like, I would have no idea. That doesnt’ mean I don’t visit the blog. I often times will click on an article and visit to leave a comment. When I do that I come right back to Google Reader. But I still want to stay connected with the comment stream. Not all of these blogs have a “email subscription” option for comments. That means if I want to see a follow up comment I have to go back to the blog. This can be hard to keep track of.

It would be cool if next to the “star” on Google Reader there was another button that you could click to indicate that you left a comment on that particular post. That way it’s all grouped together and I can follow up on comments. Right now I click the “star” button, but that’s reserved for favorites and everything gets mixed in together.

Does anyone else have another suggestion for this? I’d like to hear how you deal with this issue. I can’t be the first one to face this.

photo credit: Elisabeth Voglsam

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I only saw this today, so it’s new to me, but this provides some very relevant facts about online search behavior. Worth watching:

If you’re getting started on understanding Google AdWords then you’re probably wondering how it ranks the ads. It’s a great question and needs a detailed explanation. For starters bidding high enough on a keyword does not guarantee a high placement on search results. The bid price is one of many elements that are factored when determining the display order. This means simply having the budget to spend isn’t going to guarantee the traffic and/or visibility you’re seeking. When it comes to paid search engine ranking, it’s all about ad relevancy.

AdWords is based on an auction pricing system. So, the advertiser bids on a price point for a range of rankings for a particular keyword. For example, for the keyword “Arizona Vacation” the price range could be $0.45-$0.55 for placement on slots 1-2, $0.25-$0.45 for placement within 3-7, etc. Hence to be considered for the first two rankings you would have to bid at least $0.45 for that particular keyword. The story doesn’t end there, however.

In order to deliver the search user a better experience, Google has implemented a quality score. The quality score guards against irrelevant search results on keywords by evaluating the relevancy of the ad under consideration for a given keyword. The final ranking on a paid search is then the quality score times the bid price. (Ranking = Quality Score x Bid Price.)

Google does not disclose all that is involved in the calculation of the quality score, but it does state that consideration is given to the relevancy of the text in the advertisement and the click-through rate of the advertisement, as well as the relevancy of the landing page, etc. As you can see, the goal is to drive relevant ads for keywords for the best possible user experience. After all, a poor user experience will result in loss of credibility in the search engine. It is also beneficial for the advertiser, since this system helps to create relevant traffic.

So really in order to boost your ranking on paid search you need to make sure you have an adequate budget but you also need to make sure your ad copy and your destination website is relevant to the words you are bidding on. At the end of the day it’s all about relevancy and the user experience. Google wouldn’t be Google if it didn’t deliver a relevant search result for each query.  So, if you want to boost your position focus on improving your quality score and then up your bid a bid. If you do it right you’ll be surprised at the results.

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One of the best aspects of online marketing is the ability to measure performance almost instantly. Most webmasters these days know to have a form of web analytics software that provides insights on visitors, traffic performance etc. I use Google Analytics for this exact purpose as do most of the clients I work with. While Google Analytics is great for measuring the performance of the visitors to your website is is also helpful to be able to tie this performance directly to your online ads and activities. In other words you need to be able to measure your clients activities a full circle in order to maximize your marketing.

This is where the integration of Facebook Insights with Google Analytics becomes powerful. Until very recently Facebook didn’t offer a sophisticated analytics package. Facebook Insights was useful but in reality it wasn’t really that great. And to top it off analytics was only available if you had paid ads on Facebook. There was no real way of measuring the other things you were doing in your marketing efforts. So, for instance Facebook Insights wasn’t as useful if you were running a social media outreach and wanted to measure the performance of this traffic in Google Analytics.

Well, worry no more, Raven Internet Marketing, has introduced a tool called The Facebook Tool that is designed to fill this void. This tool helps you to manage and analyze multiple Fan Pages. The goal is to help you improve your efficiency. Plus this tool works seamlessly with Google Analytics providing that 360 view of your market.

Here is how the tool can benefit your social media campaign (from The Social Times):

• Gain better understanding of the performance of Fan Pages beyond what is provided by Facebook Insights
• Create custom, white-labeled reports on the data
• Schedule updates to ensure updates are posted during high-visibility periods
• Manage multiple Fan Pages all from within the Raven system
• Assign clients and management read-only access to view metrics at their convenience

Check it out and let me know what you think.

photo credit: The Car Spy

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I just noticed a sponsored link on Google Local Search while searching for a meeting venue in Phoenix, AZ. I noticed that the local map listing had a “sponsored link” section. I had never seen this before. I did some investigation and found that this comes from connecting your Google Places account to your Google AdWords account. In addition to connecting your accounts you then have to activate the connection. I don’t know if this is going to be a permanent feature – but apparently you’re not paying to be listed first (this only shows up on the second listing). So, the advertiser is only paying for a link. At this point its hard to be sure how that plays into the cost and value of using this feature. However, right now this feature can offer you a competitive advantage since not too many advertisers are aware.

It had been a few months since I looked in my Google webmaster tools account. All the sites I  own and operate are in this account and it’s rare for me to not be checking this account, but for some reason I just haven’t done it the past few months. When I log-in I can literally spend hours just going through all the information. It is amazing what you can learn and how you can improve your website through the data in the webmasters account. The information can help you optimize your website, improve traffic and conversions (if you’re e-commerce website).

Here are some of the  golden nuggets that can have an instant positive impact on your website:

1. View the top search queries driving traffic to your website. This gives you a picture of how relevant the traffic is that is coming to your website. It can help you answer  why visitors may not be signing up for your e-newsletter or, not purchasing your product. At the end of the day if you’re getting lots of visitors but they’re arriving based on completely irrelevant search queries, then you have a problem. You can see this in the search queries section. As a side note there is now an enhanced graphical presentation that makes guys like me drool! Here is what I’m talking about:

2. View the sites that link to your website. Which can give you a great idea of where you need to focus your link building efforts. Perhaps your SEO is not where it is because you don’t have the right set of domains linking to you.

3. Status of the sitemap you’ve uploaded to Google. You need your sitemap current everyday. If you don’t have a sitemap uploaded one up NOW!

4. The significance of your website in relation to your top sought keywords. You might think your website needs to be found for “XYZ” keyword, but what is your content saying to drive traffic on “XYZ” keyword searches? The significance scale can help you make the necessary changes to your content.

5. A bunch of diagnostic tools so you know where the Google spider is going, where it’s not going and where it’s failing.

If you have a website and don’t’ have a Google webmaster tools account, then you need to get one set up. I suggest you regularly log in to your webmasters tool account so you can stay ahead of the curve!

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