Danny Sullivan is a legend in the search marketing industry. He launched searchenginewatch.com back in 1997 and went on to develop and host the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conferences that have become must-attend media events in their own right.
Yesterday Danny announced that he will be leaving search engine watch. This news has shaken up SEOs and search marketers all over the globe. If you read the comments to Danny’s post or one of the many articles about Danny’s departure, you’ll quickly grow to understand that Danny was about as well-respected in the field as any one person can be. In fact, Google even appears shaken by the news.
I think it’s fitting to write a few words about how Danny has affected my career and helped to educate and inspire me. I started learning about search engine optimization in 1998, when I worked for a small Web shop that developed six-figure websites for pharmaceutical clients. When the clients started asking why they couldn’t find their big ticket sites on search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista, I was asked by my manager to “look into that.”
In 1998, I was a lowly writer/editor in charge of proof-reading web copy, but I loved it. One of my responsibilities was writing short Web site descriptions for submitting to directories such as Yahoo. It wasn’t a stretch to give me the task of figuring out why our overpriced Web sites weren’t showing up in search engines like AltaVista and Webcrawler.
I don’t remember what I typed into AltaVista (my search engine of choice back then) to find Danny’s website, but it didn’t take long for me to stumble upon Searchenginewatch.com. Back then it was sort of a teal blue and beige, and the most prominent link was “The Webmasters Guide to Search Engines.” I read the entire site.  Ubeknownst to me, my career was about to change.
Communicating what Danny taught me from the information he posted on Searchenginewatch.com became my mission. I worked with our site developers, designers and writers to impart the benefits of a search-engine friendly Web site to clients. I learned the value of well-written content versus flashy graphics and design, and to understand just how important my writing skills were in the Web world.
Thanks to Danny’s integrity, I learned the right way to optimize a Web site so that it would not get black listed by search engines and fall off the face of the Web. Still, my first ALT tag was about a paragraph long and spanned the width of the page.
That small Web shop where I’d worked full-time since 1997Â was bought by a much larger direct marketing company which did not understand the Internet. The Web development division grew to about 100 people (in a year)Â and my little SEO service became a slightly larger SEO department.
I was promoted five times during the company’s heydey and given two empoyee achievement awards for innovation. At the height of it all, I attended one of the first SES conferences in New York (I think it was in 2000) and got to Shake Danny’s hand.
Danny’s enthusiasm, integrity and intelligence have raised the bar for all of us out here in the search marketing trenches. He’s given SEOs a voice, helping to pave the way for the industry and, for me personally, create a viable way to make a living that I can be proud of. I have no doubt that he will continue to do great things and impact the search world. His legacy will surely live on at Searchenginewatch.com and SES.
My one regret is that I never got back to SES after the first conference I attended in 2000. I’d actually planned to go to the New York conference this coming April and looked forward to possibly shaking Danny’s hand once again.
Danny, consider this post a cyber-shaking of the hand. You’ve truly made a difference in my career and my life. Thank you.
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August 30th, 2006
Jackie
Last August, Google implemented a Quality Score review to Adwords in an attempt to motivate advertisers to make their ads more relevant to the landing ages where the ad was pointed.
Per Google, the Quality Score “aims to improve users’ experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads.“ The Quality Score was Google’s response to the many low-quality affiliate ads that brought visitors to crappy web pages with lists of products and little else. The penalty for continuing to promote these types of landing pages for advertisers is not the removal of the ad in question, but an increased CPC for ads with a low Quality Score.
While it’s not a bad thing to raise the bar for paid search landing pages, it is not always clear to advertiser’s what they can do to reduce their Quality Score, particularly since there’s no way to determine the Qualty Score on a given ad (as far as I’ve seen, although I have sent Google an e-mail about this).
It’s one thing to scratch your head with organic search engine optimization, and tweak your web site based on Google’s proprietary ranking algorithm. It’s quite another to be charged more money for an ad based on a Quality Score that contains mysterious ranking criteria outside of your control. I mean, Google, please, throw us a bone here!
Google states it looks at the following variables when determining an ad’s quality:
- Previous CTR
- Relevance of your ad text (I’m guessing that this is relevance to the keyword you’re bidding on and your landing page)
- Historical keyword performance (how this is different from CTR is beyond me)
- Landing page quality (as defined by Google’s Web site guidelines)
- And (I kid you not) “other” relevancy factors
Some of the things I’m not clear on are 1) how do content-targeted ads effect the quality score? (these ads tend to have much lower CTRs than keyword-targeted ads)Â , 2) how often are campaigns reviewed for quality? (this is important because once I make a change to a campaign, I’d like to know when the campaign will be reviewed.), 3) beyond the max. bid imposed upon my keyword, is there a way to determine the Quality Score for a given ad? Ah questions, questions, questions.Â
Until I get more info from Google (which I will happily post), here are a few recommendations for dealing with the Quality Score within your own campaigns:
- Blitz your campaign for about a month (run it at the highest budget and position you can afford for your most desired/lucrative keywords). This should give your keywords positive historical clickthrough performance, which in turn will helps improve your Quality Score.
- Do not link to your home page unless it is relevant to your ad and the keyword you’re bidding on - link internally. If an internal page of significant relevance does not exist, then create one.
- Customize ads to match the keywords you’re bidding on - this is to address the “relevance of your ad text” quality indicator - plus it’s just a good SEM rule of thumb.
- Remove poorly performing ads from your campaign quickly. Again, the higher CTR should help reduce your CPC and increase the quality of your ad.
August 21st, 2006
Jackie
For those of us who have been search marketers for five or more years, it may come as a shock that there is a huge dearth of talent in the industry and agencies are suffering for it.
We’ve been optimizing, managing, bidding, and reporting on search results for years now. We know it works. Most of us old timers have become advocates for search - helping to push the adoption of search into the mainstream. Well folks, it’s working.
If you take time to tear your gaze away from Atlas, or KeywordMax or your Google Adwords MCC for just a few seconds, you may be shocked at the range of employment opportunities that have become available to you.
But this article isn’t for you, it’s for the agencies and companies that need people like you to work on search which has grown tremendously in the past couple of years. In fact Jupiter research reports that nearly 24% of search marketers spent more than $500,000 on SEM campaigns in 2005 (compared with 12% in 2004).
If that number doesn’t give you pause, then perhaps this one will. Emarketer reports that paid search spending will reach ten BILLION dollars by 2010. I wonder what Dr. Evil would think of that?
As a person with executive level search marketing experience (and yes, I still change bids myself), I have been in the position of having to hire search marketers on several occasions. Here are a few tips for hiring your very own search marketer (hint: they may be right under your nose).
Media experience a plus: Media buyers and planners (both online and off) possess the necessary eye-hand coordination to manage search campaigns. Sure they may require some training on how to set up campaigns, manage bids and provide reports - but chances are they can pivot a table in Excel, set up a meeting with Google for a crash course in Adwords and get a search campaign launched lickity split. Media planners also have a well-grounded respect for client budgets. They have handled IOs with grace (a must when dealing with a $500K plus search spend) and don’t get frightened by the term “reconciliation”
You may not need a full-time search marketer: Unless your agency routinely spends a million dollars or more on search per year, it may not be necessary to hire a dedicated search marketer. Even at that spend, you should assess the benefit of hiring a full-time search marketer if you are grossing up the media as your sole source of payment for search. Instead, evaluate the hourly requirements of paid search management and allocate some of it to a savvy internal planner (see above recommendation) or sub-contract it to an Internet Marketing consultant such as myself (blatant self-promotion is entirely intentional)
Starving writers and/or home-based moms welcome: I know you know where I’m going with this. Stop cringing, it’s ok. There are a lot of smart people out there that want to work for you, but they cannot dedicate forty hours or more per week to one position. maybe they live three hours away. Maybe they live in Brazil. I work with a few women who consult from home 10-20 hours per week and help me out with everything from media research to bid management to writing Meta tags. I met all of them while I was working at various agencies and I maintained contact with them long after I left. It was their decision to leave full-time agency life, but they did not disappear from the online world forever - they simply changed the way they work. Fear not the freelancer!
Have realistic expectations: Sometimes I read the requirements for dedicated search marketing positions just for fun. If you are looking for one person who can create the keyword list, write the ads, research the competitors, launch the campaign, manage the bids, provide ongoing reports and recommendations, know HTML, understand organic search, tie search into your offline media campaigns, be available for new business pitches and reconcile all your online media invoices while balancing a stack of 100 plates on their head - then you may be in for a long wait. Either subcontract your search campaigns to a dedicated search agency, or evaluate how you can disemminate the responsibilities among two or three employees including people that are already working for you but may not have search marketing experience. For example, if you’re already working with a writer, then they can probably develop a preliminary keyword list and ad copy which can be given to your search guru for refinement
Learn the business, please: If you want to expand your agency’s capabilities into the realm of search marketing, then take some time to learn how to do it. Meet with representatives from Google and Yahoo. Attend at least one SES or Ad Tech conference. Download free trials of the tools. Join a search marketing discussion board. Start a search campaign for your agency and manage it yourself! Knowledge is power. If you have more than half a clue about what we deal with as search marketers on a daily basis, then it will be that much easier for you to hire us
Do-it-yourselfers rule! The best search marketers are those people who have managed campaigns themselves for their own web sites. This is primarily true for organic search, but people who have had to spend their own money on paid search quickly learn the value of ROI. Suddenly .50 per click doesn’t seem so cheap when it translates to zero sales and $5000 in media over the course of a campaign. If there’s a candidate you like because they fit in well with your agency, have lots of project management experience, know Excel like the back of their hand and LOVE the Internet, but they have zero search experience (except for promotion of their own web site or sites) consider hiring them on a trial basis. Chances are they will be happy with a smaller salary, eager to learn and will rise to the challenge
Happy head hunting. Here are a few resources to help you on your quest.
The Hired Guns: This agency (of whom I am a member) specializes in finding interim talent for high-level projects that can be done via temporary or long-term freelance positions. They have over 7,500 registered “Guns” that can come in and help you out in a pinch, with little or no training.
SEMPO.org: The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization has a job board (you must be a member to post a job) and they possess a wealth of information about the search marketing industry
SEOConsultants.com: This site is primarily focused on organic SEO, but there are always jobs availale for paid search and even general web marketing. Just another opportunity to reach potential candidates (also, people with SEO experience may also be interested in switching over to paid search and it’s not THAT much of a leap)
Jobs in Search: A job board devoted entirely to SEM (SEO and paid search) jobs
August 3rd, 2006
Jackie
I had to share this email I received from a colleague of mine who had to deal with getting an IO faxed to Yahoo Search since I was out of the office all day. It was her first time working with them directly. (warning: explicit language has not been edited out of this email, while all client/vendor names have been)
===Â
How the hell does yahoo make any goddamn money? You call - you press all the buttons…you punch in your account number…or you don’t know it…so you wait…punch numbers cause you want to speak to a human…oops that button made no sense…you are put on hold…wait….fax? why didn’t they get my fax? …they don’t seem to receive any faxes! It’s bizarre…I fax two times….they don’t receive it….the guy who leaves a message just says after a hugely long winded voicemail that could have been edited down to 2 seconds - ‘ask for YAHOO REP’S NAME- they’ll put you right through to me’ but there are several YAHOO REPS WITH THE SAME NAME there when I call…what like that one guy doesn’t know this already? He can’t speak concisely. More frustration. He uses far too many words to get a simple point across. Tick tick tick – just tell me what program this is for…oh CAMPAIGN NAME- of course. Ok here it is- I faxed it to FAX NUMBER HERE- what?? That’s not your number? Well YAHOO REP, it’s right here on you fuckin IO! Why did you put a phony fax number on you mother fucking god damn stupid IO?! Can I tell you what my number ONE pet peeve is in this business is? PEOPLE WHO DON’T PUT THE CORRECT FAX NUMBER- OR DON’T PUT ANY FAX NUMBER- ON THEIR GODDAMN FUCKING IO’S. REP NAME, really…YAHOO? YAAHOOO - REALLY???Â
===
Finally, some vindication!! Okay, now for the constructive criticism…
It is frustrating when you fax an IO to a company, any company, receive a confirmation email and expect a campaign to go live on the scheduled day - only to be met with head scratching (on the vendor’s end) when you call to see why the campaign isn’t live.
Yahoo, please, we have to work with you every day. We sell search marketing to clients as a valuable tactic to add to their media mix. We love search, really, but we do hate looking like fools to our clients. Please please please start assigning dedicated reps to your clients. You may actually make MORE money by providing this valuable service.
July 28th, 2006
Jackie
This recent article in the New York Times discusses the long-anticipated launch of Yahoo’s new paid search software - Project Panama. Â
“Project Panama” is the term being used in the SEM community to define the complete restructuring of the ancient Overture DirecTraffic Center (DTC) which falls way behind Google in terms of usability and campaign management effectiveness. The new ad platform will also seek to improve ad targeting of Yahoo paid search results by incorporating ranking criteria such as a keyword’s relevance to its related ad copy and landing page. These factors, along with the bid amount, will determine where the search ad appears on the search results pages or if the ad appears at all.
More relevant search results will translate into millions of dollars in ad revenue for Yahoo. According to the New York Times, “Yahoo will increase search-advertising revenue at least 20 percent right away - about $125 million in the fourth quarter of this year and $600 million next year.” Wow. I’d say that’s definitely worth the “tens of millions” that Yahoo has invested in the tool.
All I can say is, it can ONLY be a good thing. Project Panama is Yahoo’s promise of redemption for a clunky user interface that can make managing a campaign a frustrating chore. I hope to see some of the features I know and love in Google:
- Assigning multiple ads to the same keyword list
- Assigning multiple display URLs to the same campaign
- Better reporting and more historical campaign data (currently Yahoo’s campaign data only goes back three months.
- An easy way to download bulk listings, make changes and then upload them in bulk (without using a third-party tool)
- Better campaign results are always nice too.
So that’s just some of the stuff that would make my life easier.
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June 1st, 2006
Jackie
I got an interesting email this weekend with “Clicksettlement” in the From field. The subject line was:
Subj: Important Legal Notice Regarding Your Google AdWords Account
The body of the email reads as follows:
This court-ordered notice may affect your legal rights. Please read it carefully. If you purchased online advertising from Google between January 1, 2002 and the present, you are a class member in a class-action lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Miller County, Arkansas. This notice is to inform you of the Court’s certification of a class; the nature of the claims alleged; your right to participate in, or exclude yourself from, the class; a proposed settlement; and how you can claim an award of advertising credits under the settlement. Please read the attached notice.Â
You can get more information at: www.clicksettlement.com.
The above text also appeared in multiple languages. After much investigating over the weekend, I was convinced this was spam because:
- The above URL was redirected to this page: http://pull.xmr3.com/p/444393A4/70127684/http-www.clicksettlement.com.html
- The domain - clicksettlement.com was not resolving to an actual website (which could mean it’s getting hit with a lot of traffic.
- The email came with an attached PDF file (which I opened). Even though the file contained more info on the settlement - I kicked myself for opening it and ran virus scans all weekend.
- There was absolutely nothing showing up on Google or Yahoo for the term “clicksettlement.com” on Saturday. By Sunday, there were a few pages listed in Google for this term and I found a thread on Digital Point’s forum about the email which dismissed it universally as spam.
However, it’s not spam!
How do I know this? I spoke with my Google rep this morning and she assured me that the email was legitimate, and that Google was aware it was going out this weekend. No one at Google apparently reviewed the email though, so she was pretty surprised when I told her that most people in the search community were dismissing the message as spam.
She then followed up with an email stating the following:
This is a legitimate email regarding an invalid click class-action lawsuit that Google has recently settled. A lawsuit was filed in the United States against Google and Yahoo alleging that these companies were overcharging for ads. While Google has not agreed with what the plaintiffs have said in the lawsuit, Google decided to reach a compromise on this issue. Part of the compromise is to offer credits to our advertisers if they believe they have been overcharged for clicks on their ads that were not valid. Because our advertisers are around the world, we decided to send a notice to all of our advertisers, even if they are not in the United States, so that they are aware of this.Â
This email and the attached PDF provide details and explain how you can participate in the settlement. Please note that under the settlement, you will be able to claim advertising credits that can be applied toward future advertising with Google.Â
If you fit within the definition of the class that the Court has certified and you believe you have been affected by invalid clicks, you are eligible to make a claim. To do so, you must submit a claim form online at http://www.clicksettlement.com. Claim forms must be submitted between June 19, 2006 and August 4, 2006. Note that claims made after August 4, 2006 will not be considered. The class the Court has certified is defined as: All persons or entities, together with any officer, employee or agent of the same, that purchased advertising on the Internet from Google on or after January 1, 2002, regardless of where the ad was displayed.
And from the horse’s mouth:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/05/lanes-gifts-v-google-settlement.html
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May 22nd, 2006
Jackie
This is somewhat old news to veteran podcast-listeners, but I have just learned about The Daily Searchcast, a podcast published by Search Engine Watch and hosted by Search Engine Watch editors Danny Sullivan and Gary Price. The Daily Searchcast is self-described as, “a 10 to 15 minute overview of the prior day’s search news.” I listened in for the first time today (to May 17th’s podcast) and learned oh so much. Here are a few topics they covered…
And these are just a few of the topics covered from the May 17, 2006 podcast. The Daily Searchcast should be required listening if you are a search marketer - at least a few times a week.
May 19th, 2006
Jackie
The key to having a successfull website comes down to identifying your niche. Every website out there has a niche target, even Amazon bootstrapped themselves with the book niche.
The goal is to identify your niche and become the epicenter for all things around that category. It’s not easy, believe me - even with a blog where I post 1-2 articles per day around my niche (hot sauce) it has taken just over a year to really gain decent rankings in the engines. By decent I mean #3 in Google for a 30,000,000 plus competitive keyword term. And mind you, thats without any external link building - I’ve relied solely on the content of the site to bring in the links.
Content is a hard concept for many online retailers to understand, after all a product page is content to a search engine spider, right? Of course it is, but that one product page is not going to keep the users coming back to your site. And it’s not going to draw in the links. Retailers need to give people a reason to come back and a reason to interact with your site. Here’s a hint: Let your customers write product reviews. Good or bad, they provide perspective on the item which may lead to more sales (customer confidence) and it also provides the search engine spiders with “spider food” (and no work on your part).
But to really own your niche online, it takes a lot more work. I didn’t become the guru of hot sauce overnight, I took a risk by putting myself and my business out into the ‘public’ eye - but it’s paid off. Everyday I get to interact with my target market and they tune into the site on a daily basis. Yes, my competitors are also tuning in and watching my every move but thats the price you have to pay. And it’s definately a small price when you own your niche.
May 11th, 2006
Nick
Google announced the release of Google Trends today, prompting a fellow search geek to advise me to “blog the news” as quickly as I can. So here it is folks! Google Trends has been launched. WOO HOO!
Okay, so what is it and how does it benefit my clients?
Google Trends, as defined by Google, enables you to “compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics.” The tool also, “displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often. “
Sounds pretty cool - so I gave it a try. Many of the campaigns I work on are health-related, so I typed in “pelvic pain” and “endometriosis” as my first simultaneous search. The graph I got showed me that a lot more people search on the former term and that the highest search volume comes from two locations in India. The third highest volume comes from Chicago in the U.S. (where my client is located).
Can this help campaign strategizing in any way? Well, my feeling is that it doesn’t really provide a lot of useful information on campaigns I’m already working on - I have mountains of data from these campaigns and I know what keywords are working. Although the info about India is certainly interesting, as are the handful of articles about endometriosis.
Where I really see this tool helping me is in the preliminary research phase of an online marketing campaign. At least, I’ll know that more people are searching for “eczema” than they are for “toe fungus” over the past two years - and believe me, that looks great all graphed up in a PPT presentation! (the trends not the toe fungus).
The best part of the service (in my opinion) are the links to the articles which appear next to the trend chart. It’s very interesting to see news stories that correspond with spikes in search activity, and it seems like a good way to quickly get some background information on a given topic.
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May 11th, 2006
Jackie
I love looking at someone else’s PPC Campaign - particularly campaigns on Google because it’s so darned easy to generate reports. A colleague of mine, Nick (owner of Hot Sauce Blog and www.sweatnspice.com) put it succinctly. Nick says that looking a someone else’s PPC campaign is like looking in their wallet.Â
Here are some of the metrics I routinely review and disect when evaluating an existing, or past, PPC campaign.
- Daily spend activity: Generating a daily account summary report enables me to see the daily trends for the campaign’s spend, clicks, average ad position and impressions (searches) at a glance. It’s easy to graph this for a great 10,000 foot view on campaign performance during whatever time period is specified.
- Keyword Summary Report: This report shows the top performing keywords in a given campaign for a given time frame. It’s helpful to break this campaign report down by month, to see what the month-to-month trends have been and whether increased activity for a certain month can be attributed to external events (e.g., world events for a political campaign, for example or offline marketing of a sale for an e-commerce site).
- Ad Copy Report - This report shows me how each ad performed during the life of the campaign and gives me valuable knowledge about what ads people clicked on. It not only helps me review how people responded to the campaign’s messaging, it gives me more insight into the receptivity of certain ad groups based on ad copy (e.g., one ad group may be more receptive to the “Big Sale” and while another may be more receptive to the “Huge Selection” ad).
Other things I look at: The overall cost per click (CPC) for a given campaign - is it really high? Search to click conversion rates (anything below 1% for a keyword campaign = not good), overall click to sale conversion rate (if available), was content or site targeting used, were there vast swings in campaign performance, either for better or worse, across any of the topline metrics. For example, did the CTR suddenly drop from 2% to .3%. If so, why?
I use the above information to formulate a point of view with a list of recommendations for campaign optimization and improvement. In most cases the goal is to unearth “what went wrong” for campaigns that underperformed, went over budget or did not convert well.
So…what’s in your wallet?
May 8th, 2006
Jackie
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