Bruce Clay's Blog, page 14

PPC AMA: Paid Search Ask Me Anything — An Hour of Q&A with David Szetela

PPC AMA: Paid Search Ask Me Anything — An Hour of Q&A with David Szetela was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Last Thursday on Reddit, David Szetela offered an AMA to the r/PPC community. An AMA, or “Ask Me Anything,” is just that — an anything goes Q&A with someone of some interest, whether a celebrity, an expert, or someone with a unique role or experience set. David, our VP of Search Marketing Operations and the director of our PPC services, kept it short and sweet, opening the floor to questions for an hour.

Then he and I talked about highlights in part 2 of our podcast SEM Synergy this week.

Life After the Removal of Right-Side Ads

Give it a listen or read a transcript-recap combo here. As David described, it was a conversation marked by diverse PPC topics. Jump to the question and answers with the links below.

Google’s removal of right-side ads
AdWords reporting for Assisted Conversions and Tracking Store Visits
SEO & PPC synergy and collaboration
15-minute PPC audit
Lessons from Szetela’s personal approach to PPC
Targeting on the Google Display Network
PPC certifications worth having

Google’s Removal of Right-Side Ads

Seokingindia: David, what will be impact of removing sidebar ads in Google search?

David: Unfortunately, there are winners and losers already. The winners are the companies that can afford to some extent buy their way to the top of the page. But, even more pertinent, they’re using all of the ad extensions and maximizing the amount of real estate that their ads occupy on the search results page so that they can sometimes push their competitors down further on the page.

As we know, more real estate equals better click-through rate. Better click-through rate equals better Quality Score. Better Quality Score leads to lower CPCs which is directly related to profitability. So, it’s important to be up there with all of your ad extensions.

The losers are those advertisers who are in very competitive markets. This is frequently a local business — a law firm or financial firm, even plumbing and HVAC — where there’s a lot of competition locally and for that reason the keywords are very expensive, the CPCs for the keywords are very expensive.

Before this change it was possible for an advertiser in this situation to get some clicks and conversions despite the fact that their ad appeared low on the page or even at the bottom of the page. They’re being priced out of the market. I think there’s going to be some fallout for advertisers in those industries.

I’ve also read recently that the first-page bid amount (Google lets advertisers know how much they would need to pay to show up on the first page) is going up and that’s because there are fewer ads on the page.

I heard from Frederick Vallaeys when I interviewed him on my show PPC Rockstars this week, that when he was with Google they did experiments that led to this action and they found that the ads at the bottom of the page outperformed the ads at the side of the page. So they talked internally about trying to convince advertisers to shoot for the bottom of the page even though their ads were not high on the page. Google concluded that was counterintuitive and people wouldn’t believe it. Meanwhile, here we are.

AdWords Reporting for Assisted Conversions and Tracking Store Visits

Petpiranha: Hi David, what’s the most common mistake you see regarding assisted conversions and/or what’s your take on AdWords tracking store visits?

David: The data that AdWords reports on assisted conversions is interesting but not actionable. There isn’t a lot you can do with the information you have at hand. Google Analytics multi-channel funnel reports give you a lot more information about the number of steps that someone takes before they actually convert, and that’s actionable because you can break it down by campaign, ad group and keyword.

AdWords Tracking Store Visits, I haven’t tried yet. We haven’t had any clients that are brick and mortar places, so I’ve read about them and they seem like they would work, but I can’t say from experience.

SEO & PPC Synergy and Collaboration

ginnymarvin: Hi David, Thanks for doing this. Now that you’re heading up PPC at Bruce Clay, I’m wondering how/if the agency’s deep roots in SEO has influenced your approach to paid search at all. Are there any synergies or differences in the way teams or clients look at PPC in as it relates to the overall marketing strategies?

David: I suspect it’s different than other agencies because communication between departments even in small companies is frequently less frequent or deep than it should be. Especially recently, the SEO team and the PPC team have started to meet regularly, share reports regularly, and it’s already helped immensely.

We pull up channel reports when we are reporting on monthly performance, and we show the client not just the number of conversions and the average order value, etc., from PPC, we show those data points for organic, direct, any channel that is pushing traffic to the site. So, frequently, we’re able to say, for example, all the other channels suffered but PPC saved the day. Or, all of the channels suffered so maybe there’s something wrong with the site or maybe its seasonality.

Virginia: Or, maybe we stopped a PPC campaign and organic also suffered, so maybe there’s a synergy with the branding.

Lessons from Szetela’s Personal Approach to PPC

SamOwenPPC: What have been the biggest changes in your personal approach to PPC over the past 15 years?

David: My answer pertained to client satisfaction. I’ve learned an immense amount about how and when and what kind of information we need to share with clients and especially how to resolve issues with a variety of client personalities

Another thing I think has changed a lot is the mantra up to two or three years ago was: the more keywords the better. I remember when I was very proud to have built my first million keyword account. We had covered every possible long tail keyword, and quickly found that dealing with a million keywords imposed a huge overhead on managing the account, trying to pull it into AdWords Editor, trying to find things in the native interface. So we actually started to pursue a different approach called “keyword lite,” where we would start a new account advertising with the very obvious and very important core terms, and then we would wait to see which were the ad groups that gained the most traction with conversions and conversion rates. And then we would start to build those out with more long-tail terms.

When we do audits now, one of the things we do is calculate the number of keywords that have never converted and the number of keywords that has never accrued any impressions. Frequently we see accounts where there might be 22,000 keywords and only 100 of them have ever converted. That usually means the account has spent a lot on clicks that didn’t convert. So, we also calculate the amount of money lost to clicks that didn’t convert. That’s usually an indicator of things that need to be tackled first.

15-Minute PPC Audit

Virginia: What are the high-level areas of a quick, 15-minute audit?

We have a very detailed process, it’s a 4 page document with many different check points that we look at, trying to find mistakes and missed opportunities. We look at the ads, the ad copy, the messaging and provide feedback on that.

One of the most frequent mistakes I see is that advertisers are running too many ads per ad group. They think that’s a good idea because they think they’re testing those ads against each other. The fact is that almost always they let that test go very wrong and as a result they might be running five loser ads against one clear winner. The easy quick win is just shut off the ads that are not performing as well as the winner.

We look at ads, we look at keywords, we look at keyword match types. Another tip is that we’ve settled on using only broad match modified and exact match keywords. We’re no longer using phrase match because for some reason the cost of phrase match clicks has risen over the past year especially, and the search terms are pretty much covered by the broad match modified keywords.

We look at all the ad extensions. I would say that 80% of the audits reveal that ads are being served outside of the geographic target that the advertiser has chosen. So we look at that and calculate exactly how much has been spent on ads shown outside of the geographic location. We frequently find thousands, tens of thousands of dollars that the client wasn’t even aware of.

Why would an ad be served outside of the location an advertiser has set? The fact is that by default, there’s an advanced geographic setting that, paraphrased, says something like, show my ads to people in my location AND to people outside my location that might be interested in my products or services. That sounds innocuous but what it does is gives google carte blanche to spray the ads all over the world. It’s easily fixed, but you’ve got to know what you’re looking for. It’s in the dimensions tab.

Targeting on the Google Display Network

David, what are your preferred targeting methods on Google’s Display Network. Keyword, topics, placement, interest?

On Reddit, David wrote: I love custom affinity audiences — they provide the best possible precision. Second: remarketing lists. Third: Placement. Keyword and Topic are the least-precise targeting, but they’re great if you want wide reach.

mynameistaken: What do you mean by “best possible precision” here?

David: The ability to hyper-target ads to people in your target audience or even a subset. For example, I can target CFOs of companies in the food processing industry.

In the podcast, David expanded: Regarding custom affinity audiences, I haven’t seen a lot of resources by third parties. I’ve seen a handful of articles, one I’ve written myself. I’d say the best resource is the set of help pages right in AdWords. They still don’t go as far as they should in supplying examples; they might provide one example but it doesn’t leave the person educated about their situation.

PPC Certifications Worth Having

Dirtymonkey: How do you feel about digital marketing certifications? Any value to these? If so what which ones would you recommend?

On Reddit, David wrote: I’m a big fan. They’re great for bringing new employees up to speed. I recommend everybody pass at least the two Search exams, the Display one, and the Google Analytics one. The video, mobile and shopping ones could be optional depending on whether you intend to offer or specialize in those areas.

On the podcast, David expanded: I love the AdWords and Bing Ads certifications. Bing Ads only has one, but AdWords offers 7 if you include Google Analytics. They are difficult enough that they require study. We’ve found them to be a great way to bring new hires up to speed quickly. Even with senior people that we’ve hired, I’ve never seen somebody with a complete set of certifications on all the topics that Google offers, including myself. I’m going to pass the Shopping certification this week.

15 Social Media Manager Interview Questions

15 Social Media Manager Interview Questions was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

If you’ve ever tried to hire a social media manager for your business, you might have experienced the challenge of trying to separate the applicants interested in playing on Facebook and Twitter all day without any battle-tested experience building a brand and encouraging engagement.

If you want to hire a social media manager but want some guidance on vetting candidates, you’ve come to the right place. This article will guide you through our criteria and interview questions you need to ask (skip straight to the Social Media Manager Interview Questions).

Social Media Manager Job Description

As the name suggests, a social media manager is social. This person will naturally be excited to tell brand stories and interact with people. This person should also demonstrate an excellent understanding of your business’s total marketing mix and use social media to facilitate the overall marketing goals. The ideal social media manager is highly creative with the ability to think outside box, coupled with communication and interpersonal skills.

He or she should also be able to wield analytics to determine the ROI of social media efforts, paired with strong analytical skills and data-driven thinking. These skills are what power a social media manager to devise campaigns that engage, inform and motivate. They should also have a strong understanding of who makes up a target audience and be able to conduct persona research.

A Note on Paid Social Media

In some companies, paid social media falls under the jurisdiction of a PPC team. In others, it’s part of the social media manager’s job description or it’s a joint effort between PPC and the social team. If the latter is true for your company, the ideal candidate should have experience managing or monitoring social advertising.

Social Media Manager Interview Questions

1. What social media platforms do you have experience with?

Interviewer tip: Do these match the platforms on which your business is active?

2. What are the first 3 things you do to start your morning as a social media manager?

Interviewer tip: You’re looking to see if they have habits in place for checking notifications of brand mentions, content shares, comments and other engagements, across the business’s active social platforms.

3. What tools do you use for posting, tracking and measuring social media?

Interviewer tip: You’re trying to learn what their process is for publishing and what tools they are familiar. You’ll want them to mention how they tie social media activity to business KPIs.

4. What do you see as the point of social media for businesses today?

Interviewer tip: The ideal candidate will recognize that a business can have multiple objectives for their social media efforts, and hopefully name one or two that happen to be your business’s goals.

5. Let’s say you notice a spike — or drop — in social activity on network. What are your next steps?

Interviewer tip: You want to see how they would apply critical thinking to discover what led to the traffic anomaly. Data without wisdom, after all, is useless.

6. How does social media marketing fit into the overall digital marketing mix?

Interviewer tip: Their answer, hopefully, will demonstrate an understanding of the synergy between organic search marketing, paid search marketing, content marketing and social media marketing. Listen to find out if they have knowledge of other pillars of digital marketing.

7. Share an example of a time that you had to mediate a crisis for your business.

Interviewer tip: You’ll find a real-world example to be extremely telling of their social media management experience to this point. Remember, an ideal candidate is a fantastic story teller, so you may be assigning bonus points for a candidate who presents an exciting story.

8. How often and how quickly do you respond to comments? How do you deal with negative comments?

Interviewer tip: Does the candidate’s philosophy align with your company’s when it comes to these interactions? Do they inquire about whether there is a process in place for addressing negative feedback?

9. How do you decide which social platforms to invest the most time in?

Interviewer tip: Not all social platforms are created equally. A social media manager needs to figure out where their brand’s audience actually is and invest there. The ideal candidate’s answer should reflect that.

10. What criteria do you use to decide if a new social media platform (e.g. a new Yik Yak or Blab) is worth trying out?

Interviewer tip: Not all social platforms are created equally. Companies shouldn’t necessarily jump on every new social platform that rolls into town. The ideal candidate will present questions they use to determine what’s relevant and useful to an individual business.

11. What companies do you see that are doing social media right?

Interviewer tip: This gives you insight into their overall knowledge and social style, as well as who they’re paying attention to.

12. How do you stay up-to-date with latest trends and social media marketing best practices?

Interviewer tip: Listen for mentions of key blogs, books, conferences, experts and courses!

13. Share an example of a memorable exchange you had as a business representative on social media.

Interviewer tip: Whatever they share will illumine the kinds of interactions that matter most to them. If they don’t have an example that should be a huge red flag.

14. Do you prefer to keep your personal and professional social media presence separate from the business you work for?

Interviewer tip: To quote Bruce Clay, Inc.’s Content and Media Manager Virginia Nussey: “I have yet to see a champion brand advocate who doesn’t have a unified personal and professional online presence.”

15. What are some ideas you have for getting people excited about our business on social media?

Interviewer tip: It’s one thing for a candidate to say they’re highly creative. Get some actual examples of how they would wield that creativity!

In writing this article, I started a discussion on Inbound.org asking other social media manager what interview questions they’d like to ask (and some of those questions made it into the above list!). If you’d like to hear more thoughts on what to ask a social media manager in an interview — or to add your own — head over to the Inbound discussion!

Page Speed Issues Overview for SEO

Page Speed Issues Overview for SEO was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

You probably know that page speed is a search engine ranking factor. (Hello, Google AMP initiative?)

Not only will the users of your site have a better experience, but a faster loading page gets plus points when Google or Bing are ranking it. So SEOs use tools that help them find ways to optimize the page load time, like GTMetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow.

Of course, there’s always that one SEO analyst who wants to know why the recommendations are made to defer JavaScript parsing, reduce cookie size, or leverage browser caching. (Thanks, John!)

And actually, now that you mention it, there is value in taking a step back and describing the process of page loading, whether by a browser or a search engine, and what the page speed improvement recommendations address.

Our Director of Software Development Aaron Landerkin pulled together a presentation on page speed issues and why they happen. In his words, we often think of page speed improvements as related to content, CSS, JavaScript, or the server, yet he recommends thinking about it differently. Instead, think about where in the pipeline an optimization opportunity occurs, namely: cache, bandwidth, and processing/rendering.

Here’s the presentation, which we walk through together below.

Page Speed Issues and Why They Happen

Page Speed Issues Overview for SEO from Bruce Clay, Inc.

 

How a Web Page Is Loaded

Slide 2: Let’s start with the basics. How does a web page load? The three parts to a page load process are the DNS, the HTTP response and request cycle, and browser rendering.

These three points in the page load pipeline each have correlated opportunities for speed optimization, respectively: cache, bandwidth, and processing and rendering.

Caching

Slide 3: The Domain Name Server (DNS), like the Internet’s phone book, is a directory of domains and their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. It wants to find the number address that a word-based URL calls home. Any web page can have multiple URLs loaded in the page content, each calling a different resource. For example, a DNS lookup for a web page with Google AdSense will have to look up the page URL and the Google AdSense content delivery network (CDN).

You’ll see in this slide that a DNS lookup will try the local cache first, followed by the server cache and the ISP cache, before looking up the IP address from the Name Servers.

Bandwidth

Slide 4: The HTTP request and response cycle starts with the browser sending a request packet. The server then fulfills the request with a resource and a response code. You’re familiar with common response codes — like 200 means OK, and 404 means not found.

This cycle, or loop, happens for every request on a web page. A single web page can have a lot of HTTP requests, and a visual view of all these requests and the load order and time it takes to request and load each, is called a waterfall chart.

You can see a waterfall chart for your own page with the tool GTMetrix. Here’s the waterfall chart for the home page of our site SEOToolSet.com:

Click to enlarge a view of the waterfall chart for SEOToolSet.com.

You can see the order in which the requests cascade, what GET request takes the longest to complete, and the time required by the request in green and the upload response time in purple.

Processing and Rendering

Slide 5: Lastly, the data is processed so the page can be rendered and displayed on the screen. In the previous step, the browser got the HTML. The browser parses the HTML with some additional data, and creates a Document Object Model (DOM) — a structured framework of the page. The browser fills out the frames by processing CSS and JavaScript, then rendering the whole page.

How to Speed Up Page Load Time

Slides 6-10: So there are three points in the page load pipeline that can be optimized for speed.

At the DNS level, you want to cache resources. To get the greatest effect for your effort, start by implementing caching. “If cache is implemented properly, you won’t even need to bother with the rest.”

During the HTTP request and response loop, you want caching, smaller packet sizes and fewer requests overall. Optimizations at this point in the pipeline are the second priority after caching.

And to minimize processing and rendering time, you work to reduce the work of the browser to fetch, parse and build the structure of the page. These optimizations can be important and effective, but may require the most effort to implement and don’t offer as much bang for your buck as the previous two points.

As you can guess, for all three, less is more and size matters.

Page Speed Optimizations Categorized by Cache, Bandwidth, Processing & Rendering

The final piece of the puzzle is understanding where the speed recommendations you get in a report like GTMetrix, Google PageSpeed Insights and YSlow all fit in the page load pipeline.

So, here you go.

Click to enlarge table of page speed recommendations categorized as: caching, bandwidth reducing, or render minimizing.

The first column tells you the source of the recommendation, either Google PageSpeed Insights or Yslow.

The “Recommendation” column is what you’re likely to read in a report describing actions you can take to reduce load time.

The “Type” is the traditional way people categorize page speed recommendations, as related to the content, the server, JavaScript, and so on.

However, the “Topic” (and “Topic 2”) columns align these recommendations with the caching, bandwidth reducing and rendering model outlined here. The last column is Aaron’s notes explaining why the recommendation is made.

And now you know all you need to know about page speed optimization for SEO.

Mobile Friendly SEO Ranking Boost Gets Boosted in May

Mobile Friendly SEO Ranking Boost Gets Boosted in May was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Generally speaking, Google’s April 2015 mobile-friendly algorithm update (dubbed “Mobilegeddon” by the SEO industry) was sort of a bust. Months of talk about an organic ranking boost to mobile-friendly, aka mobile SEO compliant, websites turned out to be mostly hype.

While the April 2015 Mobile-Friendly Update did spur many sites to make their sites better for smartphone users, there was not a lot of movement across mobile search engine results pages, especially at the top of SERPs. The mobile-friendly “boost” was seemingly implemented as a tiebreaker among sites that were deemed to have equal ranking strength — a condition that rarely occurs.

Google Turns Up the Volume on the Mobile-Friendly Boost

Another mobile ranking boost announcement has just come out of Google. The announcement says that they will be increasing the effect of the mobile friendly ranking signal in May of this year:

“ Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly.”

And a later clarification: “If you’ve already made your site mobile-friendly, you will not be impacted by this update.”

So, if you’re mobile-friendly, you’re safe. And if we take Google at their word, we can assume that there are no ranking boosts for different “degrees” of mobile-friendliness.

An example of degrees of mobile friendliness might involve Google favoring sites that have implemented AMP or responsive design — two mobile-friendly implementations that Google has gone out of their way to endorse — with more pronounced ranking boosts than other “mobile-friendly” sites.

For now, it appears that the mobile-friendly status (and resulting ranking increase) is still a binary consideration; you either have it and enjoy the benefits or you don’t.

Come May, we’ll see if this latest change actually starts to shuffle the rankings more dramatically. We don’t suspect that Google wants to have two sets of ranking results — one for desktop and another mobile — but that could be on the horizon. Certainly, this news is cause to motivate any businesses still not mobile-friendly to move ahead toward that goal.

Your Next Steps

Check your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.
Read tips on Mobile SEO and Technical SEO.
Get expert assistance if you’re overwhelmed (fill out this form to get the conversation started).

To Be a Loved Brand

To Be a Loved Brand was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

This guest post by Aaron Bart, VP of Creative Services at our friends 3Q Digital, describes a concept that can be hard to put in tangible terms, but which we all strive for as marketers: becoming a loved brand. Loved brands don’t get that designation overnight. They earn that place in their customers’ hearts because of trust, innovation and technological advances proven over time.

Let’s take a look at some of the concrete examples of successful brand building done by REI and Zappos, and end by answering the critical question: how can we as digital marketers use the tools at our disposal — audience targeting and user experience design — to build our own loved brands. Take it away, Aaron.

Some brands get all the love. We all know of certain brands that have achieved a status, a following, and a perception in the market that puts them in a category we can call “loved brands.”

So, what did these brands do to become so loved and highly valued? And what does it take become a loved brand?

Forge an Emotional Connection

In order to become beloved by their customers, brands must be successful at developing an emotional connection with the right audiences, and must be able to maintain that connection and relationship over time.  To accomplish this, brands must first look inward, hire competent brand experts and brand stewards, dig deep to really know themselves internally, and develop an authentic brand story. With a well-developed, authentic brand story, a brand must first market to and win over employees and internal stakeholders.

And in order to do this successfully, brands need to first start with the right audience: develop a marketing strategy that first finds and targets customers who are going to be the most enthusiastic about the brand, who will be the first to fall in love and bring life to the love relationship between brand and consumers. These are the folks who will then help evangelize, promote, and amplify the brand story.

Establish Trust and Consistency

As in any personal relationship, a brand’s relationship with customers requires building trust, and maintaining trust through consistency — consistent articulation and application of brand (and product) messaging, and consistent customer experience. This includes off-line and online experiences with the brand’s core content, its user experience design of website and landing pages, and the way a brand carries itself in the public sphere through ongoing advertising.  Trust is also built and maintained through constant conversation with customers: listening to feedback, hearing what customers want, showing them that they are being heard.

How can brands improve their relationships with customers?

Brands must be constantly seeking out those core influencers who will be the most enthusiastic promoters and amplifiers of the brand in social and public arenas. In order to do this, brands must be constantly offering new things for them to share and to talk about. They must be open to feedback, listen to their customer’s opinions, and work at making them feel special, to maintain that sense of intimacy with the brand.

Stay Honest

Once trust is built, brands must continue to provide messaging and content to already in-love customers to maintain trust and build on that trust.  Brands need to maintain a thoughtful and honest messaging platform internally, and ensure that everyone in the organization speaks and disseminates honest brand messaging consistently across all marketing channels.

Build with Innovation and Creativity

To maintain that love connection, brands need to keep the love spark alive, through innovation. This means by coming up with fun and creative ad campaigns, news stories, and a constant flow of fresh and targeted content. It takes work to keep customers engaged and feeling like the brand is still their brand, but it’s the labor of love and effort that customers will appreciate.

Take REI, for example.  Last year during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping period, when every other retail brand was publicly promoting deals to get customers in the doors, REI chose to invest in a campaign to tell its customers NOT to shop, but rather to spend time outdoors. Because REI is an outdoor retail brand, this message clearly resonated with REI customers. REI chose to forfeit millions in potential shopping revenue in order to show its commitment to loyal customers (and employees), reinforcing its brand image in a creative and powerful way.

Stay Relevant

Brands also need to listen to customer insights data to know when the right time might be for a brand makeover, and be bold when remaking the brand. Brands need to be comfortable with a constant evolution of their brand image and messaging (don’t hold on too tightly). Brand perceptions in the market are constantly evolving, so brands need to evolve their image and brand story in ways that align with those changing perceptions.

Stay Lovable!

Do good things that align with the brand’s values, and make those known to the public in ways that reflect positively on the brand. Do good for the environment, give back to local communities, have positive labor relations, do those “good things” that the target love-audience cares about most.

Take Zappos for example: over time, Zappos has built up a close trust relationship with its customers by providing a seamless and even enjoyable shopping experience through its intuitive and clear site UI design of product returns and the exchange process.

Additionally, Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh, has been a vocal proponent of workers’ rights and employee satisfaction, work-life balance, and giving back to the community. In 2011 he donated over $300 million of his own money to initiate an urban revitalization project in downtown Las Vegas that has built affordable housing, created and staffed local arts and music education centers, and invested in local high-tech startups that has generated jobs for the local economy. His generosity and energy have been a big part of the Zappos brand story that has helped it maintain its love relationship with core customers.

What is the role of technology in building and maintaining a loved brand?

We need to understand a few key and important ways that technology can help build and maintain a brand’s love status. One is customer data technology, and the ways a brand collects and analyzes customer data. DMPs and analytics platforms can offer brands the right audience data points and customer insights, helping brands find and attract the right audiences to target and message to. These also help provide data for developing the right strategies for brands to use in reaching and communicating with the right audiences (audiences most likely to fall in love with the brand).

Digital advertising platforms and related technologies can help with media placement and audience targeting, which helps brands locate and target-market to the right audiences, with messaging that resonates the most, helping to develop that love connection.  There are platforms that can help brands practice successful social listening, and use social data that is gathered to build, maintain, and expand the love connection with customers – by hearing what customers are saying, showing that they are being heard. These platforms and technologies around social listening can also be leveraged as a testing ground for honing the brand story. Social media platforms are also the best place for brands to have their core enthusiasts share, advocate for, and evangelize the brand, to influence new potential customers to become loyal followers.

User experience design and web development technologies can help brands create the right visual language, and design the right online interactive experiences that align brand story with the right audiences. A/B and multivariate testing platforms (Optimizely, Adobe Target) help brands constantly test and hone their core messaging, across the right channels, to target the right audiences with personalized content. Personalized content is key to deepening the brand love connection, by having customers feel like the brand was made just for them. Technology now can help brands dynamically target and publish personalized messaging and content to a wide range of audience segments based on already available first-party data points.

In all, loved brands are necessarily good at staying true to three things: their own core tenets; the needs and desires of their customers; and the data that tells them the evolving story of who their customers are and what those customers need and expect in order to stay connected.

Free SEO Tool: Maintain a Transparent Site with the SEO Cloaking Checker

Free SEO Tool: Maintain a Transparent Site with the SEO Cloaking Checker was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

In the market for new SEO tools? Thinking about Bruce Clay Inc.’s SEOToolSet? We recommend trying our free samples. Just for you, we’ve selected ten powerful tools from this renowned set and made them available to you, free of charge. These ten FREE SEO tools featured on SEOToolSet.com can be used right now to improve your SEO campaign without logging in or providing your credit card information. Useful? Yes!

You know what’s also useful? Brief how-tos without fluff. To help you get the most out of our free tools, we’ve created the Free SEO Tool Alert series – short, easy-to-digest blog posts on the free SEO tools in our toolbox. Today’s free SEO tool is:

The SEO Cloaking Checker

Tool type: page analyzer, server health

What you’ll learn: The free SEO Cloaking Checker shows you if you’re cloaking, or featuring two different versions of the same URL – one for search engine robots and the other for human visitors.

Why this matters: Cloaking goes against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and is considered a “deceptive” SEO technique. If you discover cloaking on your site while using this tool, you can dig deeper to fix the root issue(s), improve the health of your server, and improve your search engine rankings. You can resolve to be transparent.

This is the SEO Cloaking Checker; submit a URL to use the tool.

SEO Cloaking Checker
URL:




SEOToolSet™ Page Cloaking Report



URL





















= No cloaking found, = Cloaking found. You may need to check the site for the specific user-agent.

 

How to Use the Tool

Submit a URL into the SEO Cloaking Checker and press Check for Cloaking.
This free SEO tool shows you the SEOToolSet Page Cloaking Report, a straight-forward chart that features major search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, as well as web browsers Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Opera.
Use the chart to see if the page you have submitted is cloaking according to each listed search engine and web browser.

Here is an example of a site, www.bruceclay.com, with a negative cloaking report:

A green check mark means there was no cloaking found; a red X means cloaking has been detected.

5 Ways to Use the Data

The SEO Cloaking Checker tool is a quick way to discover whether a web page is cloaking according to the search engines. Use the chart to:

See if major search engines and browsers detect cloaking on your web page. If you’ve run the complimentary SEO Cloaking Checker and received a report with one or more red “Xs,” the tool has discovered possible cloaking. Now what? While a positive cloaking report is not necessarily a good thing, knowing there is cloaking on your site gives you a starting point from where you can hunt down the issue and fix the problem. But before we dive into what comes after a Positive Cloaking Report, let’s take a break to learn how the tool works and what sets it apart from other cloak checkers.




How it Works The typical cloak checker on the market today examines the amount of content on a page and compares it across browsers. The problem with this type of method, however, is that differences such as a small tweak in the content or an A/B Test can come back as cloaking, or a false positive. In other words, it’s too sensitive of a method and can’t be relied upon. Bruce Clay Inc.’s SEO Cloaking Checker bypasses this problem by analyzing the page differently. This free SEO tool examines sections of a page and compares the content across the browsers. The result is a smarter tool that can gather contextual information about a page and provide a more accurate cloaking report.

 

Positive Cloaking Report

With a positive cloaking report in your hand, here’s what you need to do next:

Investigate the source of cloaking. A simple cloak checker will not tell you what the issue is, only that cloaking has been found. See a positive cloaking report as a red light, signaling you to stop and explore the possible cloaking issues that might be negatively affecting your rankings.

There are many different types of cloaking, some done on purpose to manipulate rankings, some that are not deceptive by nature but still show up as cloaking, some are pure accidents, and a host of practices fall in the grey area.  While checking your site for the source of cloaking you might even find that it was placed by a hacker.  Since not all cloaking is considered deceptive, it’s up to you to decide whether what the tool has found is something you want to fix or keep. Of course, this is when an experienced SEO comes in handy. With enough experience and wisdom, a manual check should lead to the discovery of a cloaking technique that’s affecting your site.

Fix cloaking issues found on your site. Once you’ve discovered the type of cloaking that is affecting your site, go to work to resolve the problem. The opportunity to take care of any cloaking issues ensures that you’re showing search engines exactly what you’re showing your users, and this type of transparency is rewarded by the search engines.


 Improve rankings.There’s a reason for a sudden drop in rankings or that manual spam report you received.  Learning that a search engine has found cloaking on your site means that you’ve found one possible reason it is not performing as well as it could be in the SERPs. Cloaking can result in the outright exclusion of your site from Google’s index, and when you fix the issue, there’s a great chance you will improve your rankings and make it easier for your customers to find you online.

In addition to finding a positive cloaking report – and using the information to identify the issue, fix the problem, and hopefully improve your rankings – you can use the information in the Page Cloaking Report to:

Discover that your site has no cloaking issues. You’ve submitted a URL into the SEO Cloaking Checker tool and received green check marks across the chart. Congratulations, the page you’ve entered has no cloaking issues. Interpret this data as a green light to move on to other monthly maintenance checks and server health procedures.

When to Use This Tool

The Free SEO Cloaking Checker is fast and easy way for you to find out if your site has cloaking issues. Making sure your site is free of cloaking ensures that it’s not running afoul of Google’s quality guidelines.

If you have the SEOToolSet Lite or Pro package, this free SEO tool gets run automatically each time you run the Single Page Analyzer, our robust on-page SEO analyzer tool.  But if you don’t own it yet, you can easily use this complimentary tool to check for cloaking as often as you want, including:

During a regular maintenance check. Use the SEO Cloaking Checker on a monthly basis to ensure the overall health of your server.
After a major change to a site. Whether it is a big server change or a back-end change to how the pages are rendered, run the cloaking check tool to make sure the page is working as it should.

10 Free SEO Tools

Bruce Clay, Inc. offers 10 Free SEO tools you can use right now without logging in. You don’t have to register or provide your credit card information. Although free, these tools are strong enough to improve your search engine optimization strategy today, starting with a quick check to find out whether your site is cloaking according to the search engines.

If you enjoyed learning and using this tool, explore the rest! Our Free SEO Tools series introduces you to each tool, shows you how to use them, and how to make sense of the information. Read the Free SEO Tools series here!

How to Care for Your Shopping Campaigns #SMX

How to Care for Your Shopping Campaigns #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Ecommerce paid search pros! This is the moment when SMX West becomes all about you!

Moderator Ginny Marvin (@ginnymarvin), Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land

Speakers:

Kirk Williams (@PPCKirk), Owner & Minion, ZATO
Purna Virji (@purnavirji), Senior Client Training and Development Manager, Microsoft
Susan Wenograd (@susanedub), Sr Manager, Accounts & Ecommerce, Clix Marketing

From left: Ginny Marvin, Purna Virji, Susan Wenograd, Kirk Williams

Kirk Williams: Setting Up Shopping Campaigns for Success

How To Care For Your Shopping Campaigns: What To Do Every Day, Every Month, Every Season By Kirk Williams from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

Initially, if we think of how to optimize our shopping for the future, the cold, hard reality will eventually hit: you can only optimize as far as you stop that. Don’t be a dung beetle, who starts with dung and optimizes that. He’s going to suggest a setup strategy that sets up success.

Why is your current campaign setup bad? Because, bidding. You’ll bid the same for general queries as you are for long-tail high-intent queries.

Is there a way to setup campaigns so you’re not bidding on products but rather separating queries by intent? Yes! This idea was originally shared by Martin Roettgerding (@bloomarty).

Filter shopping queries by four essential aspects:

Campaign priority
Negative keywords
Shared budget
Product bids

Six things learned:

Ad groups trump product groups. “Let’s make keyword funneling great again.” Because of negative queries you can filter the queries in campaign structures.
You Be You. SKU might not work for you, and that’s OK. Identify natural query groupings by profit.
Bids can overrule priorities. (Google no-likey timid bidding.) Be aware you can’t bid so low you’re not appearing in the auction anymore.
Beware of dangling negatives. This might be a query that comes through and it’s horrible and you don’t want it to appear (like the letter “M”). Add [-m] to non-brand, branded and all other campaigns.
The Bing effect. You should be importing your shopping campaigns into Bing because it’s really easy to do. But there’s no shared budget in Bing and he explains that this can cause a problem with general queries jumping into your campaigns, so this kind of ruins the strategy on Bing.
It takes a while to soar. You have to get your client/boss on board. It takes time, build out time, but it’s awesome.

Susan Wenograd: Google Shopping Ongoing Optimizations

Reaping The Fields in Google Shopping: Ongoing Optimizations By Susan Wenograd from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

Let’s assume you have something set up. Now what do you do with it?

Paid search tools can often feel like a bunch of valves and you can tighten and open up different levers and valves. Shopping campaigns are like a fire hose. You tell the search engine what NOT to match to.

Air Traffic Control: Query Mapping

Negative keywords all the tings. Create negative keywords to funnel search queries towards the groups that are the most profitable. This ties back to ad groups being more important than product groups. Ad groups give you the control to negative and match queries where you want.

Don’t Burn Money: Structuring for ROAS

Evaluate your strongest ROAS performers. This is where Ad Groups come in handy vs. Product Groups. Test grouping strong ROAS ad allocating budget.

Remember, there is no Product Group tracking in Analytics.

Also note: you are not bidding on a search query. You are bidding on a product.

Evaluate product attributes beyond standard feed fields:

Inherent attributes: physical attributes
Client-made attributes: seasonal, sales, determined by the business as an attribute that accounts for business decisions

Use custom labels so you know what ad group to place a product in. You’re not limited to the labels they give you. Although, there will be products that could possibly live in different ad groups. So, plan your structure ahead of time. When you have the right structure, where something should live is a lot easier to figure out. Structures can evolve over time as you analyze performance. Granular tends to be better.

Bid Strategy Fussing

There’s no one best way:

Manual CPC
Maximize clicks
Enhanced CPC
Target return on spend (newish; your mileage may vary)

Mobile

A missed opportunity: if you have physical storefronts and you show inventory in a store, set up a bid modifer to a radius around your physical locations to capture nearby searchers.

Make sure your Google My Business is linked to your AdWords. Regularly evaluate performance by distance.

Check out seasonality wins and weak spots.

Wrapping it up:

Query map and negative keywords like crazy.
Consider grouping items based on ROAS/margin to drive how aggressively you bid.
Utilize Custom Labels to create more specific groupings and increase your control.
Evaluate mobile user performance based on distance from physical storefronts.
Evaluate mobile performance vs. competition.

Purna Virji: 3 Shopping Campaign Tips That Would Make Paris Hilton Proud

Thats Hot! 3 Shopping Campaign Tips That Would Make Paris Hilton Proud By Purna Virji from Search Marketing Expo – SMX

The first mental image that comes to mind when she thinks of shopping is Paris Hilton. So we’re going to take inspiration from Paris.

Our agenda:

Labels are important — feed optimization
Don’t be boring — creative optimization
Hire bodyguards — defensive strategy

Labels Are Important

Custom labels give you more control. Utilize optional attributes for more powerful segmentation.

Heres an optimization for product feed and campaign organization. There’s nothing wrong with this structure:

But this is more efficient:

Bids can be applied independently
Targeting adjusted to top geos
Increase budget for top selling products
Monitor low-inventory and move products out

Here’s a checklist of possible custom labels:

Price range (like: high end, low end, sale)
Popularity (like: high demand, low demand)
Profit margin (like: high, low)
Stock level (like: limited supply)
Seasonal products (like: winter clothes, swimwear)

Don’t Be Boring and Dress Cute Wherever You Go

Make sure your shopping campaigns look good. This comes down to picture, price, store. The picture is what jumps out. Don’t use boring colors. Check to see that your product image stands out in the field.

Core creative elements for shopping ad image:

Show multiple colors
Show product in use
High resolution images

Bing research has showed that white background tends to perform better. You can’t use text on an image. If there’s more than 60% white space, your image might not show.

These are the core creative elements for a shopping campaign: image, price and enhancements.

Start with regular price
Add sale price
Or price competitively against each other

Core creative elements for a shopping campaign ad extension/enhancement:

Use local, product reviews and merchant promotions
Use promo text
Create more than one ad per ad group

Hire Body Guards: Defensive Strategy

Key defensive strategies:

Negative keywords
Campaign priority settings
Bids and bid modifiers

Negative keywords save you money. Campaign priority settings let you prioritize high/medium/low and filter products. Bids and bid modifiers through custom labels will allow you to focus the majority of your time and energy on the items that work for you. Adjust by smartphones and tablets, “everything else,” and geographic bid modifiers.

Bonus tip: misattribution is not hot. One of the top pet peeves they see at Bing is importing a shopping campaign from Google but not updating tracking codes.

App Developers: What You Need To Know About Apple iOS App Search & Universal Links #SMX

App Developers: What You Need To Know About Apple iOS App Search & Universal Links #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

From left: Emily Grossman Ian Sefferman Barry Schwartz

In SEO we focus a lot on Google, but app developers have a special need to get their app content to show up in Apple Search as well as Google.

Take a crash course on Apple Search and Universal Links, the latter of which are used to get your iOS and Android apps to show up in Google search.

Speakers:

Emily Grossman (@goutaste), Mobile Marketing Specialist, MobileMoxie

Ian Sefferman (@iseff), CEO, MobileDevHQ

Emily Grossman: How to Optimize Apps for Apple iOS Search and iOS 9 Universal Links

Google pays Apple $1B to be the default search engine on Safari. Google makes a lot of money off iOS devices and searchers. They’re probably making a huge return on this investment. iOS users are not likely to change their default search engine.

But before the user hits enter in the search bar of a Safari browser, Apple gets to show them their own suggestions, like apps in the App Store. Apple is cutting in front of Google. Think about this: Apple’s App Store commission is now at a run-rate of $9B, more than its total revenue in the year the iPod launched.

In recent years, with the launch of iOS 9, Apple introduced Universal Links and Apple Search. These two help drive people back into apps.

Universal Links: take a traditional web URL and make it so the single URL opens up content in a website or in an app if the user has the app installed. It’s like “One Link to Rule Them All” and it’s the ideal for Apple.

Apple Search: Apple’s search engine provides results when searchers use Spotlight, Siri and Safari.

Apple has an index and will show your app content in the three areas above. Apple is expanding their index and predictive search engine.

Next, how these two things work technically.

Universal Links 101

Universal Links are not 100% universal yet; they only work in the Apple ecosystem. And there are some other problems, but the upshot is that you can get your app to show up in Google app indexing.

Anatomy of a Universal Link:

Requirements:

A registered domain
SSL access to your domain (the most common barrier to entry)
Ability to upload a JSON file to your domain

Major steps:

Prepare your app. Modify your application delegate. Adopt an entitlement in Xcode that lists each domain associated with your app.
Prepare your website by associating your app with the website. Create an apple-app-site-association file for each associated domain with the content your app supports and host it at the root level.
Use control paths to control indexing with Google. Modify the apple-app-site-association file to specify only the content that is parallel between the app and the website.

Universal Links services: 1-click and you’re done. Branch.io, Yozio, Deeplink.me, HOKO — this may be an option if you don’t want to go through the manual process yourself.

Apple Search App Indexing

Next, we’ll talk about getting your deep link app screens in Siri and Spotlight without setting up Universal Links. Apple doesn’t have one single index; they have a public index and a local device-specific index per user. When we know any particular Apple Spotlight search, for example, is aggregating general public and personal private, we can see why Apple has three ways to get info from different indexes.

NSUserActivity is like something that might be bookmarked, something that’s been interacted with by the user.

NSUserActivity

When Apple gets enough activity on a screen in an app, Apple may move it to the public index.

CoreSpotlight

Web Markup

Corresponding content on web page and app. To do this markup, Apple knows your website exists with iTunes connect. Use either the support URL or marketing URL to point to your corresponding website.

MobileMoxie: bit.ly/universal-links-tool is a tool in beta and has emulators and validator tools for this process.

Ian Sefferman: Apple, the Next King of Search

Spotlight: general purpose iOS search. (This is the potential gateway for Apple to be the next king of search.)
Universal links: mapping the web to your app
App indexing: indexing your app into Google

Spotlight

Gett is the taxi hailing app in Israel. If you put your destination in, Gett saves that destination location in case you want to use it again. Then, next time you search for the app, those location pages are results that come up in search.

Imgur indexes all their content into Spotlight and if you have the Imgur app and search Spotlight for “cat” you’ll see Imgur app results. This is search in a privacy conscious way.

Spotlight uptake in apps has been going up linearly since iOS 9 was released. 35% of the apps that have implemented Spotlight search rank in the App Store Top Charts.

 

Universal Links

This is the next generation of deep links. An example is Open Table, and how you can search Google on your Apple device, and then go to the app from the search result.

Universal Links by category:

27% of apps using Universal Links are in the App Store Top Charts. The level of engagement has been going up for apps with Universal Links. Engagement here means the number of app opens that come from Universal Links (Google Search, another app using the Universal Link).

Measuring Spotlight Referrals

By adding some code you can tell how many people open your app from a Spotlight search:

Similarly you can add parameters to count Universal Link referrals:

What You Need To Know About Apple iOS App Search & Universal Links #SMX

What You Need To Know About Apple iOS App Search & Universal Links #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

If you want your app to show up in Google app indexing, this liveblog coverage shows you how. In this SMX West 2016 session, two mobile marketing experts take you into the world of universal links, which includes a crash course on this hot industry topic as well as steps on how to index your app into Google.

Speakers:

Emily Grossman (@goutaste), Mobile Marketing Specialist, MobileMoxie

Ian Sefferman (@iseff), CEO, MobileDevHQ

Emily Grossman: How to Optimize Apps for Apple iOS Search and iOS 9 Universal Links

Google pays Apple $1B to be the default search engine on Safari. Google makes a lot of money off iOS devices and searchers. They’re probably making a huge return on this investment. iOS users are not likely to change their default search engine.

But before the user hits enter in the search bar of a Safari browser, Apple gets to show them their own suggestions, like apps in the App Store. Apple is cutting in front of Google. Apple’s App Store commission is now at a run-rate of $9B, more than its total revenue in the year the iPod launched.

In recent years, with the launch of iOS 9, Apple introduced Universal Links and Apple Search. These two help drive people back into apps.

Universal links: take a traditional web URL and make it so the single URL opens up content in a website or in an app if the user has the app installed. It’s like “One Link to Rule Them All” and it’s the ideal for Apple.

Apple Search: Apple’s search engine is in play with Spotlight, Siri and Safari.

Apple has an index and will show your app content in the three areas above. Apple is expanding their index and predictive search engine. Next, how these two things work technically.

Universal Links 101

Universal links are not 100% universal yet; they only work in the Apple ecosystem. And there are some other problems, but the upshot is that you can get your app to show up in Google app indexing.

Anatomy of a Universal Link:

Requirements:

A registered domain
SSL access to your domain (the most common barrier to entry)
Ability to upload a JSON file to your domain

Two major steps:

Prepare your app. Modify your application delegate. Adopt an entitlement in Xcode that lists each domain associated with your app.
Prepare your website by associating your app with the website. Create an apple-app-site-association file for each associated domain with the content your app supports and host it at the root level.
Use control paths to control indexing with Google. Modify the apple-app-site-association file to specify only the content that is parallel between the app and the website.

Universal links services: 1-click and you’re done. Branch.io, Yozio, Deeplink.me, HOKO — this may be an option if you don’t want to go through the manual process yourself.

Apple Search App Indexing

Next, we’ll talk about getting your deep link app screens in Siri and Spotlight without setting up Universal Links. Apple doesn’t have one single index; they have a public index and a local device-specific index per user. When we know Apple is aggregating general public and personal private, we can see why they have three ways to get info from different indexes.

NSUserActivity is like something that might be bookmarked, something that’s been interacted with by the user.

NSUserActivity

When Apple gets enough activity on a screen in an app, Apple may move it to the public index.

CoreSpotlight

Web Markup

Corresponding content on web page and app. To do this markup, Apple knows your website exists with iTunes connect. Use either the support URL or marketing URL to point to your corresponding website.

MobileMoxie: bit.ly/universal-links-tool is a tool in beta and has emulators and validator tools for this process.

Ian Sefferman: Apple, the Next King of Search

Spotlight: general purpose iOS search. (This is the potential gateway for Apple to be the next king of search.)
Universal links: mapping the web to your app
App indexing: indexing your app into Google

Spotlight

Gett is the taxi hailing app in Israel. If you put your destination in, Gett saves that destination location in case you want to use it again. Then, next time you search for the app, those location pages are results that come up in search.

Imgur indexes all their content into Spotlight and if you have the Imgur app and search Spotlight for “cat” you’ll see Imgur app results. This is search in a privacy conscious way.

Spotlight uptake in apps has been going up linearly since iOS 9 was released.

Spotlight by category = industries where there are apps that are winning through indexing.

35% of the apps that have implemented Spotlight search rank in the App Store Top Charts.

Universal Links

This is the next generation of deep links. An example is Open Table, and how you can search Google on your Apple device, and then go to the app from the search result.

Universal Links by category:

27% of apps using Universal Links are in the App Store Top Charts. The level of engagement has been going up for apps with Universal Links. Engagement here means the number of app opens that come from Universal Links (Google Search, another app using the Universal Link).

Measuring Spotlight Referrals

By adding some code you can tell how many people open your app from a Spotlight search:

Similarly you can add parameters to count Universal Link referrals:

PPC Q&A: Paid Search Roundtable at #SMX

PPC Q&A: Paid Search Roundtable at #SMX was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

You’ve tuned in to Q&A for PPC lovers. Questions covered in this SMX West session include:

How do you think speech search will impact ads?

What video ad tips, strategies, success stories do you have?

What tools do you use?

How do you find work-life balance?

How do you create space with your clients? How do you manage clients?

What is the biggest weakness in the PPC industry?

What are your suggestions for testing text ads?

From left, Andrew Goodman, David Szetela, Christi Olson and John Lee

Moderator:

Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster (@mvanwagner)

Speakers:

Andrew Goodman, President, Page Zero Media (@andrew_goodman)
David Szetela (@szetela), VP of Search Marketing Operations, Bruce Clay Inc.
Christi Olson (@christijolson), Bing Ads Evangelist, Microsoft
John Lee (@John_A_Lee), Managing Partner, Clix Marketing

Matt starts out with a quick story. In 2002, he got started in the business. Paid search is fascinating and you want to do it day and night. And as it turns out, you do end up doing it day and night. (Everyone on stage is nodding their head). Matt says he doesn’t have a good work-life balance.

How do you find work-life balance?

John: It’s the biggest challenge. The fact that it bothers a lot of us is that we care. We want to be driving performance. His wife is the voice of reason that reminds him to spend time with kids.

David: His balance has been found in age. You learn to not sweat the small stuff and there’s an awful lot of small stuff in everyone’s day.

Christi: In having a perspective from in-house, agency and on the Bing side, she sees all sides. At an agency, there’s always something to be doing. You have to prioritize. You could do all this stuff, but will it make that much of a difference if you do it. You have determine for yourself. If you’re in a busy season, you may accept 18 hour days.

John: The biggest thing is understanding the line between working and being aware because you can control campaigns from your phone.

Matt: Do you ever turn your phones off? How do you unplug?

Audience member: A group of entrepreneurs she knows meets every Tuesday for dinner and they all put their phones in a stack and no one touches their phone and instead they all have good conversation.

Andrew: The book “The Millionaire Next Door” shows that people in an environment who save (vs. spend) are more likely to be happy. Living in a small city is an environment where people aren’t stressed. His company has a lot of remote workers and they aren’t going to jump off a cliff if you don’t get a click.

How do you create space with your clients? How do you manage clients?

David: Be reasonably responsive to email. That diminishes the amount of times that they want to speak with you. Sometimes it takes actually saying to the client, “I’m not able to respond to 8 emails before 8 am.”

John: Consistent, regularly scheduled calls are a pinpoint on the map where they know they can get a hold of you.

Christi: You can set hours. Send a response so that you know you’re looking into it if the question requires in-depth research and that you’ll be getting back to them with the answer in X time frame, then meeting that time frame.

Andrew: Educate clients about the method behind the madness.

Christi: If you’re on the fifth email response in a long thread, pick up the phone.

John: Email doesn’t convey emotion and it can push you into panic mode.

Brad Geddes in the audience: If you’re getting an email response ready at 2 a.m., don’t send it then. Batch send/schedule it for 8:30 a.m. so they don’t think they can get you at any time.

What tools do you use?

John: They all have their own shortfalls.

Christi: Different tool for different clients.

Andrew: Optmyzer is the the best out there. The entry level is like $50 a month.

David: Automated ad testing on steroids: Adalysis.

Christi: Can we have a panel of tool users and not tool reps talking about what we like and don’t like about tools, and the pricing models?

David: I have a controversial view about automated bid management. I’ve said: prove to me that you can do better than Google’s automated bid manager. Vendors only have data from their own pool of users. Google has all the data, including conversion attributes on the keyword and the searcher. So how can a third-party vendor possibly do a better job than Google?

John: I wrote an article about all the little utilities and tools he uses, and he filled pages.

On Google AdWords, my call extensions are disallowed because of DKI that doesn’t match the page.

John: Use Google Search Console to blanket approve your site. This is the same issue with call tracking. The instructions are in the AdWords Help.

How do you think speech search will impact ads?

David: It’s not our problem yet. It’s becoming a problem. Stats he’s heard — people 18-24, 55% use voice search exclusively. Search engines are going to be figuring out how to monetize voice search, have ads for voice search.

John: The idea of conversational search, you start with a long-from question that has a root term, and then it will perform additional searches pivoting on the root term. One idea is that there will be another match type, like contextual match.

Andrew: Thinks this is a futurism question of whether advertising is going to be as much of a thing. Utility is the focus and none of that is monetized. Apple is not a company that monetizes, but they have a business model. Microsoft and Apple are creating utility for the future and there will be less advertising and they have to figure out as companies how they get paid. It seems to me Google is in trouble if they don’t figure this out.

Christi: Context again matters. Cortana may answer you directly, sometimes it will give you a SERP. Then it’s up to the search engine and advertisers to think through the funnel of user intent and where you can reach the consumer. It’s going to be a time to revisit negative keywords and keywords that match voice search.

David: To understand where it’s going, get an Amazon Echo. You’re conversing with a device and starts to become second nature. You’ll see where it’s all going.

John: Amazon Echo is a data collection device for Amazon to understand you and what it can sell you better.

Andrew: It was an era of freedom with the SERPs, 10 or 11 ads that could show up … and now they’ve taken away the right rail and that’s a wake up call that not everyone can show up.

Video paid ads: tips, strategies, success stories?

John: Don’t think of YouTube as a perfect direct response channel.

David: It’s demand generation display advertising.

Christi: YouTube is not the closer and never meant to be the closer channel. It’s exposure.

David: Like any display advertising, the sole purpose of the first impression is to persuade people to engage further. The important things about a video ad is the still image and the first 3 seconds of the video. This has to engage before someone has a chance to skip.

John: If you do it, be sure to have your retargeting audiences set up.

What is the biggest weakness in the PPC industry?

Andrew: The high-level weakness that hits people in the eyes is scale of business and bigger competitors. If someone can beat you by outbidding you, you need to grow, mimic as much as you can with extensions and matching conversion rates. The other weakness is broad match.

Matt: The FCC should ban search engines from allowing broad match. It’s fraud. Google should not be able to do this with good conscience.

John: Expanding on that: a long time client asked him to look at his campaign settings and he saw “search or display select,” targeting all countries, all languages, only broad match. These are all defaults.

Christi: We can get into the weeds. We don’t think about the big picture enough. Think strategy on a regular basis, and how your search campaign connects to SEO and marketing. Be part of the bigger picture working toward a goal and talking across.

John: To the platforms, he’d say that he doesn’t like “talking points.” He doesn’t like Facebook pushing video or the month of mobile.

How do we build personas for B2B leads? Customer serving isn’t always an option.

David: Sales teams.

Andrew: This is about keyword intent. Take a defensive, skeptical stance with B2B search. Assume it’s broad intent. The keyword research phase is annoyingly intensive for B2B.

John: Have theories you’re going to test but don’t make assumptions.

Suggestions for testing text ads?

Andrew: Come up with 3 or 4 concepts to test: is it about price, describing product? Headline is the biggest influencer.