Come for the Ride…

At the most recent meeting of the Atlanta Gang of 5, the subject of marketing using SEO/SEM came up.  Like most conversations about SEM, the discussion went something like this:

Person 1: I spent $$$$ testing Adwords but I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.  It drove some sales, but it didn’t really pay out so we stopped it after X weeks (or months).

Person 2: I also spent $$$ testing Adwords.  It worked but I think I need to hire someone to do it for me cause I’m sure it could be doing better.

Person 3: (Nodding)  We dropped $$$$$$ into Adwords but it really feels like a full time job monitoring it. I wish we had the resources to do it but we don’t.

As someone who used to manage pay-per-click campaigns for various brands, it makes me cringe a little to hear entrepreneurs dive in head first without checking to see if there’s water in the pool.  However, they really can’t be blamed because sometimes large brands do the same thing - the only difference is they have more budget and therefore, more room for error.

Confession: I’ve even done the same… throwing some money in the pool just to see how things would run without properly setting up all the metrics.

The truth is most business owners test Pay-Per-Click to check one thing - Will this drive me more traffic? The answer to this question is a 100% YES! Just like any other marketing tactic, if you throw any money at it, expect to see a lift in traffic through that medium.  However, if that’s the extent of your test, most of you will feel a little empty inside even after getting the answer you want.  After all, it’s similar to playing the slots - will this machine pay me if I put in some money?  Eventually yes…

So how do you REALLY test PPC marketing and when should you hire external help?

With so many things that can be tested and refined in a PPC campaign, if you are new to SEM and can not optimize your campaign in at least 10 ways (seriously, that’s 10), you should probably outsource your campaign creation and let them run the show for at least 2-3 months until the campaign is somewhat optimized.  At that point, if the contract is in your favor, you can hopefully keep the campaign and the work and continue running it on auto pilot for a few months until it needs to be tweaked again.

The reason I would recommend this technique is because most entrepreneurs take risks and many dive into PPC without being properly trained in it. (Let’s face it, it’s what we do.)  Unfortunately, this means throwing money away at an unoptimized campaign and giving up on the whole thing weeks or months later when the ROI doesn’t work out.

Pay-Per-Click can be great at helping you make money!  In fact, the only reason it’s popular IS because it has helped so many mom and pop shops reach the right audience amongst the masses on the internet.  If you’re still not convinced at hiring a professional is the right thing to do (at least for the setup), my next post will highlight some of the things you should look out for when setting up PPC campaigns.

Everyone on the internet is running around like a headless chicken saying video is the next big thing.  Of course, since it IS the next big thing, many ad agencies have been trying to take advantage of viral videos to help boost their clients’ brand into the buzz world.  However, from the many attempts I’ve witnessed and the storyboards that have been presented, most of them have been or would have been huge flops.

In most cases, technology is not the issue.  A viral video is all about the content and in exchange for great content, the viewers are willing to sacrifice quality and post production touchups.  So why is it that a 13 yr old girl can capture a random event on their cell phone and have it be more viral than a professional commercial that cost $25k to produce?  What is it that teens and social media experts get that traditional brands don’t?

The missing element is… the danger zone.

Viral videos for the most part crosses the safety line and bring in to light something that shouldn’t be seen.  Now, when I say “shouldn’t,” it doesn’t necessarily mean a sex tape even though those are pretty viral.

Shouldn’t includes a number of things such as:
- the likelihood of witnessing that in our lifetime is close to nil
- something created that was meant for private viewing
- something so amazing you just had to pass it on so you can discuss how awesome it was
- a new idea or process that invites imagination and wonder
- a train wreck or something so dangerous that you simply can’t look away
- something so stupid you just have to pass on because it made you feel smart
- something witty caught on video that made you smile after you watched it

Unfortunately, the above is where most brand marketers get stuck because they aren’t allowed to cross the safety line into the danger zone.  In fear of offending anyone at all, most brands have chose to stick around in the safe zone when producing videos or worse, they try to take it half a step further by faking the funny or faking the dangerous situation by staging the act, which usually bombs miserably.

Most people can tell a genuine smile from the fake one you do when posing for a camera and that 6th sense is heightened 10 times more when watching it in video form.  So if you’re looking to do a viral (promotional) video of your product, make sure you ask yourself if your video crosses any of the lines mentioned above.  If it doesn’t, you’re probably going to waste a lot of money and time to learn the hard lesson.

Here’s one that was trying to cross into the danger zone.  They were close… but just not quite there.

I don’t have the stats to verify whether Google’s having a bad day or if something we did on our end changed the way referrals are ranked. However, it’s scary to know that a huge chunk of your business depends on referrals and rely on just one source.

Google had a bad day today (at least for us). Across the board on Google Base, organic referrals and search network referrals, everything was down to the point of WTF. Seeing how referrals from other sites maintained their average, it would be great to find out why our referrals on Google dropped suddenly. Maybe (Hopefully) it’s only a one day mix up. I wish I had more data points…

The long tail SEO experiment took a bit longer to conduct than others. Traditionally, these things could take a few weeks up to a few months to get right. Luckily for us, a site with millions of pages, it’s easier for us to make an impact on the long tail items than some of the other websites. (We also have more room for error if the terms we picked are not the right ones the first time around.)

Although we only have 4,000+ pages indexed vs. just over 1,000 pages indexed 20 days ago, we made a number of significant changes to our website that we hoped Google would recognize. I won’t go into what keywords we used as it will not apply to most of you that are reading - however, some of the techniques we used that are applicable include:

- Changing dynamic URLs to static looking URLs
- Optimizing different keywords for every page of the website
- Focusing only on one to two different phrases per page
- Making sure every page have unique titles, descriptions, keywords, etc.

The chart above shows our Google organic referrals over the last 24 days and as you can see, once the changes were done, we only had to wait about a week or two before organic traffic picks up.

You could of course pay $30k to $60k a month for 100,000 users to check out your website or if your poor, try to get the same number of users by being good great at SEO. Due to our limited marketing budget, I’m hoping our basic and advanced SEO techniques will take us close to where we need to be for the monthly traffic.

On the flip side, unfortunately I think we can only do so much before we have to step up the paid media. However, I am hoping that cap for SEO traffic is just high enough that we can start making some good money before we have to spend a ton to take our traffic to the next level. Time will tell though!

Overall Rating: SEO = success (and then some!)

Our experience with Stumbling for traffic was met with moderate failure.

Our initial stumble and efforts to get a group to stumble the website into the rotation was met with a spike in traffic.  However, the way stumbling works is pretty similar to how drunks stumble into various things.  Even though they stumble into your door, sometimes you wonder if you really want them there.

The web browsers that stumbled to the website was untargeted. We received on average close to 100%  bounce rate as well as a session time of 1-3 seconds.  Whoop-dee-do.

Subsequent stumbling of the website have failed to spark additional traffic even though technically we should be seeing more as a result - I’m not really sure how their algorithms work but it definitely does not seem to be working correctly.

Overall - I would recommend focusing your efforts elsewhere for qualified traffic as stumblers aren’t up to par.  The service seems to be great for bots or marketers who are looking to promote something. Usually if I’m browsing something on the web, I’m surfing with a purpose.  Even for people with way too much time on their hands, I fail to see why they would stumble from site to site just to be disappointed.

On a separate note, as a webmaster who installed the StumbleUpon toolbar, I have noticed I would occasionally tap on the Stumble button by accident - which leads to confusion, anger, and then me clicking the back button.  I would hate to think users who I worked hard to get are coming to my website by accident, and then leaving before ever trying to figure out what’s actually on the page.

Bottom line - would not recommend.