About five months ago Google and Yahoo! announced an agreement that would allow Google to advertise on Yahoo!’s paid search result columns, and in turn allow Yahoo! to utilize Google’s AdSense program in the US and Canada. The deal was made in an attempt to strengthen Yahoo! as a corporation after Microsoft tried to take the company over.

Back in September news started leaking out that Google may throw out its deal with Yahoo!. The two companies combined currently handle 80% of internet searches all over the world. It’s understandable then why the US Justice Department was bringing up issues of possible antitrust violations.

Although the US Justice Department had already hired an antitrust litigator, Yahoo! was steadfast in calling the deal lawful, stating that “We have been informed that the Justice Department… is seeking advice from an outside consultant, but we should read nothing into that fact. We remain confident that the deal is lawful.”

Google may have seemed hopeful at first too. However, early this morning Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond announced that Google would not move forward on the deal.

“…after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners.” Stated Drummond in his blog.

Drummond also expressed his regret for having to pull out of the deal since the company felt that I would have been a win-win situation not only for Google and Yahoo!, but for publishers, advertisers and users as well.

Yahoo! had no comment on their Search Blog as of this posting. I’m sure there’s more to come though.

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For those who may not have heard that there was a plethora of publishers and authors attempting to sue Google.com for copyright infringement: Back in 2004 Google.com launched their book search program for which thousands of books from university libraries were scanned and made available on the World Wide Web for public consumption. The book search allowed users to search with a keyword, author name, title, etc, and Google would bring back relevant samples out of those books.

Sounds great, and it was. Unfortunately Google failed to get permission from the authors and publishers before scanning and posting their work. As a result, Google.com was sued (almost exactly three years ago to the day) in 2005 by the Author’s Guild, The Association of American Publishers and several other copyright holders for profiting from their work without properly compensating them for it.

Well on Tuesday, the two sides finally reached a settlement.

So what does this mean for Google, readers, publishers and authors? David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer stated in his Official Google Blog on Tuesday that

“This agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways. First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.”

David Drummond, Google

Not only was Drummond pleased, but Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin expressed their excitement over the deal as well. All in all it was a very fair and beneficial ruling. Let’s do a more detailed breakdown of the settlement to see what Google, the copyright Holders and Readers can expect to happen next…

GOOGLE
The internet giant will be allowed to scan books that have a valid copyright which are also out of print. They can sell online access to individual books within digests and volumes, offer subscriptions to university databases. In the near future they should be allowed to let subscribers print the books that they search for and find on Google.com.

Google is also expected to fund and help to establish a new Book Rights Registry which will be managed by copyright holders. The purpose of this new registry is to “address the orphan works problem” by locating and representing copyright holders, make old and out of copy books more available to the public, and to distribute all royalties that Google pays out.

Of course there’s always the matter of money. Under the settlement Google will be paying out a total f $125 million as an upfront payment and an additional $34.5 million to fund the new registry.

Google Hands Over $125+ million in Settlement

PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS
Obviously the new Book Rights Registry will be beneficial to all copyright holders since it allows them to be paid fairly for the use of their work. Aside from cashing in on 63% of Google’s book search profits, publishers and authors are getting about $45 million up front – or about sixty bucks per book.

Copyright holders will be able to have more control of how their work will be used. Google will be allowed to give non-subscribers a look at about 20% of the content in each out of print book. Subscribers will have full access to Google’s scanned out of print tomes. In order to offer the same access to in print books, Google will need permission from copyright holders.

Drummond notes in his blog that although the settlement only covers United States users and copyright holders, Google will do it’s best to respect everyone. International authors and publisher will be able to register themselves in the new Book Rights Registry so they can be paid fairly. International users will be able to search and view the full content of out of print texts, “but will not be able to preview or purchase access to books online unless these services are authorized by the rights-holder of a book.”

READERS
Under the agreement, readers will need to subscribe to services in order to view the full text of these books. They will also have greater access to more texts that they wouldn’t have other wise, which was Google’s and the copyright holders’ ultimate goal.

Thanks to a part of the agreement that allows Google and participating libraries to develop new technology and services, users and subscribers with disabilities will also have full access to these books.

For more information on the deal, you can go to Google’s press release.

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Day-Parting, or the act of targeting your internet advertising (like banners, ads and pay-per-clicks) to audiences at certain times of the day, can be difficult to set up and evaluate efficiently. Conversion values can range from 5% to 25% or more for a single retail company according to George Michie of the Rimm-Kaufman Group. Being able to measure and act on the daily, or even hourly differences in data is essential and requires careful analysis and execution. Luckily, I’m about to give you some tips to help you and your small business get day-parting done right.

Quality, Not Quantity
Just because you get more clicks at a certain time of day or week, doesn’t mean your conversion rates (sales per click ratio,) are going to go up too. Besides, you have a budget to think about. You may get 100 clicks a minute between 9:00 a.m. and Noon, but can you afford it? Finding times where

Analyze Your Non-Brand PPC Traffic
Making sure that you are analyzing the right kind of traffic is essential. Brand, Direct load and non-brand (competitive) pay-per-clicks behave very differently. You should be isolating your competitive pay-per-clicks and analyzing them separately. Your job should focus mostly on analyzing the PPC that your software program controls – basically your direct and brand PPC. Also, avoid the common mistake of discounting time zones when looking at what day or time a click came in.

Give Credit Where it’s Due
When tracking click to sales conversion rates, keep in mind that most companies don’t reap the benefits of a banner ad right away. People often surf around the web at one time of day, then make their purchases later on, or the next day. This means that you can’t make a correlation between how many clicks you receive in an hour and how many sales were completed at the same time. Use your cookie tracking tools to give you an idea of when people are looking at your ads versus when they actually make a purchase.

Another thing to keep in mind: People may do much of their web surfing at night while they are home, then return to your website from their work computer the next day to make their purchases. There also may be a time of day when people click on your ads, yet choose to call the 800 number to order instead of make their purchase online. This can make tracking difficult, but it’s worth taking into consideration when looking at clicks and sales in a given time period. One way to offset this phenomenon is to slowly beef up your day-parting one segment at a time and keep an eye out for any unexpected results.

Stay Current, Reasonable and Balanced
You should be using data that isn’t too old, but you also want enough time to gather a sufficient sample. Six to Twelve weeks worth of data is probably perfect depending on your business type. Be sure to exclude things like holidays and special sale events since those numbers can throw off your regular data. Also, be sure that every time-bucket has at least 100 click-to-sale conversions. Any less is too small of a sample to read.

Consolidate and Segregate
Instead of analyzing every bucket independently or a full 12 weeks at once, you can consolidate a day, part of a day, or week. For instance, you can group all the hourly buckets in a day into four groups of eight buckets. This would also help to consolidate sparse data from those hours of the day or night when you don’t get as many conversions.

Day-parting is not always a priority for SEO/M managers, and it shouldn’t be. But the steps above can certainly help you make better decisions regarding where you advertise on the web, what data to collect and discard, and how you should spend your time analyzing that data.

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Google’s retail insights team made a great post here regarding taking advantage of the seasonal ‘back to school’ trends. I think they have done a fantastic job of going through the process of understanding the user behavior, what they are looking for and how to contextually target those users.

We mentioned this type of thinking a few days ago in ‘Seasonality and search campaigns‘ and our Google hot trends post. We always recommend that clients take advantage of these opportunities, whether they are month long trends or single day bursts. It’s just one way to stay ahead of your competition and get better value for your advertising dollar!

Think outside the square and try to expand into areas which aren’t your primary focus audience by targeting these kinds of opportunities. Write creative that will appeal to the users looking within these kinds of secondary and topical search markets, never use your standard, generic creative.

Later this week as part of our search education series, we will go through some basic steps to help identify seasonal trends and how to leverage them.

Happy hunting!

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Quite often, we get asked questions like “How much should i spend per month on paid search?” - This one is a fantastic question, however, there is really only one person who can answer that and that is you!

Some things to consider when developing a budget for your paid search campaign:

1. Determine some solid campaign goals. These can be branding, traffic, conversions or whatever other metric you find is most relevant to your business.
2. How much each click is going to cost you - Do some keyword research, try to get an idea of what each click is going to cost you.
3. Workout how many clicks you need to make a difference to your bottom line and at what point you make a profit. I would recommend analyzing your current conversion data and starting with that to workout your ROI.

Now that you have some basic figures around what goals you need to hit to make you profitable, you should be able to work backwards and then workout how much money you can spend on your paid search campaign.

If you are running a CPA based campaign and you are making profit directly from the clicks, then its an easy argument to say that your budget should be unlimited. The more clicks, the more profit. Simple, so as long as you keep hitting your average conversion goals and your CPC stays within your target range, let it spend!

If you are after click volume and your revenue is based on lets say page views through an advertising network, the equation isn’t much different. Take your average CPM and work backwards, taking into account things such as the average number of times each user returns to the site etc to see how much you can afford to pay per click and still remain profitable.

The tough decision with budgets comes on purely brand based campaigns as the flow on effect from this is sometimes hard to directly attribute to paid search. So i guess, without knowing specifics about the brand, the tracking or anything else this is more of a “What can i afford to spend” kind of dilemma where you bite the bullet and allocate X$ per month and then re-evaluate.

This isn’t intended to be an in depth article about defining budgets, simply some thoughts around ways of allocating budgets and getting clients thinking about some more fundamental questions which factor into their search budget allocation.

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Yesterday we went through getting started with adwords part 1, so if you read that and it all made sense. Good stuff, if not, there may be a thing or two in here for you anyway, i do recommend going back to part one however if you haven’t read it yet.

We have chosen our language, written a simple text ad and explained a few little reasons why we do what we do. Now it’s time to develop some keywords and finish off the account setup process.

Step 6) As you can see in the screencap below, Google gives a very simplified version of its keyword tool when you are going through your first campaign setup.

Any keywords you do get from this particular tool, aren’t really going to give you any insight into why you should be using them, other than a quick relevance check when you browse over them. So, instead of using this tool i’m going to ask you to load up the Google Keyword Tool Basically, this is using the same back end technology as the above tool, however its giving far more meaning to any keywords that you do choose.

The first thing you should do when you come to the keyword tool page is choose the specific country you want data for. If you are reading this guide, i will assume its campaign number one so stick to just one country for the time being. Select that country and then enter some descriptive terms about your website and business. For the sake of this example, lets keep going with the boston doctor theme.

Once you have entered the CAPTCHA code, you are going to be presented with a window which looks like this:

You may look at this and go “so what does this do for me?” but to understand the importance of this you need to understand the way it used to be. Basically, until a few months ago, you had to go and buy third party software which would quite often cost many hundreds or thousands of dollars, just to try and attach any meaningful figures onto your keyword research. Then Google released the current incarnation of this tool with accurate, country level keyword volumes and keyword research completely changed overnight.

Ok, enough of a rant there. Basically, what this is telling us is that as expected, the keyword Boston Doctors gets a good volume of searches and actually has relatively low competition. Which is fantastic as it means you are competing against fewer competitors and will ultimately pay less for clicks!

Next, i recommend scrolling down the list and picking out keywords which the tool is suggesting that are highly relevant to the specific business you are trying to advertise and you can do this one of two ways. Go through them one by one and click add on the right hand column, then download the list when you finish. Or you can go right ahead and download the entire list, then sort through the keywords in excel (I would recommend the second option)

One last thing i will point out with this tool, is to make sure that you scroll down the list a fair way and then go to the section that says “additional keywords to consider” this section is going to be filled with keywords that Google things are logically related to the terms you entered in the previous step.

The last thing you then need to do is take all of the keywords you chose and enter them into the text box on the Adwords page (Step 3 of 7)

Only select keywords which are highly relevant to the ad which you wrote earlier, remember that the ad must match the keywords you use to trigger it and also match the page you are delivering users to. So stay away from adding in keywords like doctors for the moment as they will eat up your budget.

Step 7) - The final few choices i will roll into one step as they are pretty self explanatory. You need to choose your currency, so for this example USD will do fine. Next Adwords is asking you to set a monthly budget, so go and calculate what you are willing to spend on search marketing and then enter about HALF of that figure into this field. The reason i say this is because you are still learning, no optimisation has been done and for all intensive purposes you may waste that whole amount with very few results. I also recommend that once you have setup your campaign you go in and set a daily budget which further restricts your spending (We will show that in another post)

Leave the last two check boxed ticked and then press continue.

Ok, you will finally come to a screen which is going to ask whether you already have a Google account. I will assume that you don’t, so click the button which says “I do not use these other services” and you will then have the chance, to enter your email address and choose a password.

Click on “create account” and viola, you are done. You now have an adwords account, have written an ad and have chosen relevant keywords based on volumes and relevance.

Our next educational step by step guide will focus on what to do after you have created your account and how to understand whether or not you are getting any real value out of your campaign. So stay tuned early next week for that one.

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Lots of clients love running seasonal campaigns and “burst campaigns” which will run for short periods and ultimately have no positive benefit to the overall marketing objective. There are however exceptions and with the recent buzz around the Olympics, i thought it would be a good time to put some thoughts down on how these kinds of events can be more effectively leveraged.

A quick snapshot of the olympic related traffic spikes over time. (Click for a full sized image)

Get in early & plan ahead - One of the most important things is to plan ahead when developing seasonal search campaigns, having a calendar of events which are relevant to your marketing goals and developing keywords, creative and tactics well in advance of each event. I recommend uploading search campaigns and activating at least a month in advance of the traffic spike, which ultimately occurs during the event.

Relevance - This is the most important factor to consider when developing an event based strategy for your marketing, remember that your site has to be highly relevant to the keywords you choose and if users get to the site and find nothing of interest, or the context in which they are searching doesn’t match what you offer. You are throwing money away!

Budgeting - Allow for much larger budgets during event heavy months than during those with less activity. This way you get the maximum advantage from months with lower CPC levels and higher traffic volumes, some events will drive tens of thousands of clicks per day for a much lower CPC than average. Once again, setup a calendar and skew each months budget based on potential search traffic.

Competition - With many of the events which happen throughout the year there will be little or no competition to your ads. This means cheaper clicks, better click through rates and better quality scores. Remember, they don’t need to be massive worldwide events in order to cause traffic spikes. Festivals, Music Acts, Elections, News Stories and many other elements will cause a quick change in search behavior. Taking advantage of this and being first to market can deliver a significant advantage.

Track and analyze - As with all search campaigns, make sure that sufficient tracking is in place and analyze the data thoroughly in order to tell the true effectiveness of each campaign. Most of our clients find that after the first year worth of events, they have a solid list of events which deliver the most value and then run campaigns around those core events.

As always, Optimise creative constantly and make sure that when initially uploaded, develop at least three different versions and set your campaigns to rotate evenly, so that you can determine the best performing executions and then expand out upon that version, then start again with another three variations based on the winner.

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Todays post is the first in a new series of educational, step by step guides which will help those just starting off with search marketing on Google to hit the ground running. I will throw a few extra steps into the process and give advice based on what you should be doing to start with a more optimised campaign, instead of a campaign which will get you a lot of irrelevant clicks and blow your budget like most adwords starter campaigns!

This guide is obviously aimed at those who are just getting search marketing running on their website. More advanced optimisation and development articles will follow.

Step 1) You need to load up http://adwords.google.com this is the homepage of the worlds biggest and most talked about online advertising program Google Adwords. You will see up the very top of the screen a link which says “Click to begin”, go ahead and click on that which will take you to step 2.

Step 2) Once you have decided to start the signup process, Google is going to ask you to choose Starter Edition or Standard Edition. Now, if i were starting a new campaign i would choose the Standard Edition however, lets go through the process of using the starter edition as there are a few different steps involved.

Click on the starter edition radio box and also on “i have a webpage” then click continue. (If you don’t have a webpage, we will be developing a simple how to guide shortly to suit your needs)

Step 3) The next thing Google is going to do is pop-up a little sub window which will ask for additional details. Let’s ignore that and get on with the signup process, so click continue without entering the additional information.

This next page is where you enter all of your target information such as location, language, keywords and other factors which will help to refine your advertising and ensure that you aren’t just throwing money away.

Step 4) So let’s choose our location and language, if your business is a local and geographically specific business such as a bakery or a doctor, this is probably the most important step. Make sure that you choose a specific region or at the very least your state. If your business is a countrywide or global, online business, then i would suggest choosing some of the major countries such as the USA, Canada, UK.

To start off with, lets simply choose the USA.

Step 5)Next, Google is going to ask us to write your very first ad! First, let’s enter your URL. The important thing to remember here is that this won’t always be your homepage. You should be delivering users directly to the most information rich, sales driven page on your website. So think to yourself “What is the page which would best sell and explain my product or service?” then enter that page in.

Next, we need to write your ad. The most important thing is to remember that there is very limited space with only 35 characters in the headline and 70 characters worth of description text. So each ad has to be to the point and if possible, feature part or all of the keyword you are targeting. There is no one, trusted way to write a text ad but i will give a few quick tips.

Step 5A) - Headline The headline is the most important part of your ad, this is the part of your ad that gets noticed more than anything else. Your headline should be to the point and feature at least one of your major keywords. Ideally you would write a variation of your ad for each major group of keywords so that they are all closely matched. To begin with, we are only writing one ad so lets create an example.

Let’s say you are a doctor in Boston and you offer services only within the Boston region. For this kind of account i would write a headline like: Experienced Boston Doctor or Local Boston Doctor You basically want to try and sum up the service you are offering within that small 35 character space.

Step 5B) Ok, now for the description this is where you can start to be more creative and try to differentiate yourself from other competing advertisers. I recommend going to Google and searching for a keyword like Boston Doctors for the sake of this example, look at what your competitors are using and then try to improve on it!

Try your best to include any points of difference between yourself and your competitors. An example descriptions for this kind of ad are: “Serving the Boston Community for 15 Years. Trusted and Professional”, Basically i think since its a medical industry ad, trusted, safe, reliable are all words which should be focused on.

Step 5C) Display URL, this is the domain name of your site which if you are lucky, will be highly relevant to your market. However one important thing to remember is that you can add a folder name onto the end of your display URL without it existing on your website. This extra bit of advertising space can be a great way of fitting in an extra keyword and making your ad more relevant.

For the example of a Boston doctor, your display URL might look something like this BostonDoctors.com/Advice or BostonDoctors.com/HouseCall - Take advantage of this as your competitors will most likely be. Anytime a user searches for a keyword, if that keyword is within your ad it will highlight in bold!

So that i don’t overload you with all of these things, i am going to leave part one of getting started with Adwords for today and continue on tomorrow. We will get more in depth into keyword research both using the Google tool and other resources.

Come back tomorrow for part 2 in this new series.

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Google recently updated the way in which it communicates adwords quality scores to its advertisers. These fundamental changes, give a more insightful and meaningful metric to advertisers which is “first page bid” instead of “minimum bid”. Basically, a minimum bid is a pretty useless idea of how well your ad is going to be seen, especially in a competitive category because a minimum bid usually will be somewhere deep in page number 3 or 4 of results pages.

Here is how Google explained the way in which the new formula will work in their latest inside adwords post

Here’s an example to illustrate how per-query Quality Score works:

Nancy’s Dairy advertises on the keyword ‘milk.’ Nancy’s ads perform better on the keyword ‘milk’ in the U.S. than in Canada. Her ads also perform better on the query ‘milk delivery’ than on ‘milk,’ and better on certain search network sites than on others. Instead of one static Quality Score and minimum bid that determines whether the keyword ‘milk’ is eligible to trigger an ad for all search queries, we will now determine eligibility dynamically, based on factors such as location, the specific query, and other relevance factors. For that reason, Nancy’s keyword ‘milk’ will be able to trigger an ad for search queries where it’s likely to perform better, i.e., in the U.S., on ‘milk delivery’ and on certain search network sites.

Now, the biggest problem i see with this is that Google STILL DOESN’T give advertisers the ability to run bulk, campaign wide quality score reports. That however is a whole different issue that i will address shortly.

Google also states that quality scores will now update in real time which is a massive improvement because until now, quality score sweeps could happen several days or even weeks after making a change to an ad. Which is of course a bad thing when it comes to paying too much for clicks.

One of the other big changes is that keywords will no longer be deactivated. I’m sure we have all come across dozens of keywords in large accounts which will quite often become deactivated due to low quality scores. In fact, i’ve always found it quite useful to look at accounts in adwords editor and sort by keyword status, the inactive keywords are always the first ones to be optimized!

Google the ever evolving beast is doing a fantastic job across almost all areas of adwords and is still lightyears ahead of Yahoo, Keep up the good work guys!

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One thing I have noticed lately is that surfers are becoming far more aware of geo-location based searches. The explosion in user education which has happened thanks mainly to Google has trained users into searching for location specific everyday items. “Pizzas near me”, “New York restaurants” etc.

My comments in this post relate specifically to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid search campaigns related to local search, i will be posting a seperate and more in depth article on organic local search.

Now, the problem with the vast majority of search agencies is that very few have taken their clients down the local search path and still build search campaigns specifically around the ultra high volume and cost keywords, ultimately missing the local opportunity. Some clients of course get more use out of localised campaigns than others. Restaurants, Doctors, YMCA’s of course should be focusing on their specific locations, however massive, broad reaching businesses such as Yellow Pages, Hotel networks and other businesses which span massive numbers of locations still seem to be showing generic advertising copy and delivering users to the wrong content.

I guess what I am trying to say is that – Local search is here and its growing much faster than the general search landscape. Users want and expect completely localised results, tailored to their location and giving them everything they are looking for on the FIRST PAGE after clicking a link. Not browsing through a few different post landing pages to find what they want. It’s time to start thinking locally and about how you or your clients can leverage this massive opportunity.

On average, every local search campaign we run saves our clients 20% on the cost of their clicks. That’s 20% more clicks for simply optimising the hell out of their content and properly structuring search campaigns.

There will be a series of upcoming articles and guides on local search and the opportunities which exist within the space. So stay tuned!

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