Tom Bright
Internet Marketing Specialist

Google announced this week that they are encrypting searches for users logged in by default. What that means to the search industry is that search queries won’t be available for reporting within Google Analytics, nor will they be available from referring search URLs. The data is available at a roll-up level, however term-level detail for visitors to your site that were logged into Google will NOT be available.

Danny Sullivan  over at Search Engine Land reported having spoken with Matt Cutts (Google engineer extraordinaire) and Matt estimates that the overall impact will be in the “single-digit” percentages of all Google searchers.

While this sweeping statement and generalization of impact may give some people a sense of security, I believe we need to stop and give pause to the potential impact to this change.

The vertical you are targeting and your demographic could greatly affect how your data gaps may appear. People in a more technology-driven vertical may see larger gaps, as users in that vertical tend to be the first in adopting a technology or tool like Google+.

The folks at Search Engine People have a great graph of searchers per month that utilize Google: 1 billion. So, we have a baseline estimate.

Google uses a unified log-in. So if you use ANY Google service, such as Google+ or even Gmail, you log in. Out of convenience you stay logged in. Google+ announced it’s at 40 Million users recently. At the end of 2010 Google announced that Gmail (their most-used communcations app) and other business apps are available to 3 Million businesses and 10 million students.  Based on an article last year by the BBC, estimates place Gmail usage at 170 Million  users.

Another part we need to look at is the mobile market. Based on an estimate in July, the overall user estimation is 130M in July with 500K + being activated a day. Every Android phone that searches with Google will be encrypted and their queries will not be available.

Just examining usage from Gmail alone places 17% of that estimated 1 Billion users squarely within the sites of potential “logged” in user accounts. Adding another 130 million users for Mobile, allowing for some overlap, the estimate can easily be well over 20% rather quickly.

If you use Gmail as a business service like we do here at Parallel Path, then you stay logged in all day long. Any time you search for something, no one will know what you searched for. This has huge impact potential for verticals such as B2B or Technology, where potentially large chunks of users use services from Google on a daily basis as a way of life.

Something tells me this “single-digit” exposure Matt Cutts is estimating could be a bit more when you step in and start looking closer by vertical. We will keep you posted on what we notice!

Tracy Earles
VP of Marketing & Business Development

Bryan Connally recently wrote a blog posting on Google’s new social recommendation tool, +1. In particular, he addressed whether your site should implement +1. While his analysis was fairly broad (i.e. should your site participate or not), I’d like to take a narrower look at +1’s effect on pay-per-click advertising with Adwords.

Google presumes, and we agree, that users will be more likely to click on ads that others within their social circle have recommended by previously clicking on the +1 button. Therefore, Adwords advertisers should care about +1 and its effects. Given that there is no way to opt out of the program, they should also take the necessary actions to maximize its value.

Adwords advertisers should recognize that the +1 recommendation is attached to the landing page, not the ad. Clicking on the +1 button next to the ad will subsequently show that recommendation anytime Google serves that landing page URL in a paid or organic search result.

If users are more likely to click on ads with +1 recommendations, then +1 will have an indirect effect on quality score, by improving clickthrough rate. Given the potential for abusing +1, and the importance of quality score within Adwords, we believe Google will limit the impact on quality score of the +1 effect on CTR. How will they do that? It’s too soon to tell, and we may never know for sure.

Some search marketers even believe that +1’s social signal will be strong enough to have a positive effect on landing page conversion. While we believe that may be possible, we’ll wait to see evidence in the data.

Adwords ads may not request users to click on +1 in their ad copy. According to Google Adword’s creative guidelines:

“Your ads may not direct users to click on Google +1 buttons. Your ads and landing page should not imply or directly promote offers, prizes, monies, monetary equivalents, services or deals in exchange for +1 clicks. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.”

However, firms could certainly promote +1 in other media, particularly word of month. Just ask.

In addition, firms can place a +1 button on their website so visitors can recommend directly from the page they’re viewing. In fact, site operators should consider adding a +1 button to all relevant pages of their site, and all of their PPC landing pages, to maximize the likelihood of capturing recommendations. As Bryan pointed out, there is no “-1’ or negative action, so there is little risk in doing so.

When a user clicks on the +1 button next to an ad, the advertiser is not charged; it’s a free action. Although Google has stated that they will start reporting +1 actions in the Adwords interface [under Dimensions tab, Free Clicks selection], we have not yet seen evidence that it is active.

Conclusion: Let the data be your guide

At Parallel Path, we’re big believers in testing. We’ll test the +1 button on a few landing pages and see if it drives improved CTR. If it proves to be valuable, we will recommend that Adwords advertisers take the time to place +1 buttons on every landing page to take advantage of the ‘compulsory’ +1 program.

The third in our Aha!Local University series, this four-part video series explains local paid search advertising; what it is and how small business owners can use it to market their products to local customers.

A demonstration of Parallel Path Corp.’s new InSight ™ PPC reporting dashboard. Parallel Path created InSight to enable clients of our pay-per-click management services to efficiently evaluate and monitor their campaigns, no matter how large or complex those campaigns are. Delivered as Software as a Service, it is available 24 x 7 for all Parallel Path PPC clients.

Sophisticated Dashboard for Monitoring Pay Per Click Marketing Performance

Boulder, Colorado (PRWEB) 31 March 2010.  Internet marketing agency Parallel Path Corporation announced today the availability of their new InSight™ PPC reporting system for the company’s pay-per-click (PPC) management clients. InSight gathers, merges, and abstracts detailed PPC data from multiple sources to provide a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use dashboard of PPC information for evaluation and monitoring, and to support campaign decision-making.

The larger and more diverse the PPC advertising program is, the more difficult it is for the advertiser to maintain adequate visibility and control. InSight provides robust PPC reporting and campaign intelligence at the client’s fingertips for even the most complex programs. The InSight system gathers PPC campaign data from a variety of ad publishers, including Google, Bing, and Ask, and combines it with revenue data from analytics and ecommerce packages, like Omniture and Google Analytics, to provide unique visibility into PPC campaign performance. This broad data capture capability enables Parallel Path to provide clients with unique cross-publisher visibility, so they can, for instance, quickly make decisions on the most profitable advertising allocation between the different search engines. For ecommerce operations, InSight enables clients to evaluate their PPC investment on return on advertising spend (ROAS), the ideal metric by which to judge and manage PPC performance. Other InSight features, including easy comparison of date ranges, a repository for monthly performance reports and other documents, and printable reports combine to make InSight a unique, enterprise-class PPC reporting dashboard for Parallel Path clients.

Parallel Path has long developed proprietary tools to improve service performance and scalability. InSight represents Parallel Path’s first step in the development of proprietary SEO and PPC reporting tools.

Said Brian Cleveland, Parallel Path’s founder and CEO, “the PPC reporting dashboard is the first of many reporting tools we’ll be rolling out under the InSight umbrella. Our goal is to provide our clients with best-in-class monitoring and decision-making capabilities, regardless of their advertising budget or the breadth of their campaigns.”

A Peek at InSight

Here’s a quick look at what clients will see when they log in to the secure InSight website:

About Parallel Path Corporation

Founded in 2005 in Boulder, Colorado, Parallel Path is an innovative and results-driven Internet marketing firm that partners with clients to grow their business through customized Internet marketing strategies. Parallel Path develops and deploys complete Internet campaigns using the entire online toolset: search, display, social, mobile, and local. Passionate about Internet marketing, Parallel Path delivers the in-depth expertise, along with implementation consulting for clients’ marketing, IT, sales, and related teams, to achieve powerful and measurable marketing results. With their Aha!Local service, Parallel Path also delivers online marketing solutions to brick-and-mortar business operators and franchisors, as well. For more information, please call 303-396-1111, visit www.parallelpath.com, or follow @parallelpath on Twitter.

Media contact:
Tracy Earles
Parallel Path Corp.
303-396-1111

Jeff Edwards
Internet Marketing Specialist

The rewards of having a well known brand name are obvious. A well executed brand strategy can make your company much more recognizable and trusted by consumers. This can pay off when it comes to sales, and can lead to a huge ROI for your company. Chances are if you work for one of these recognizable brands you and everyone who came before you have spent countless hours building up a very valuable brand name. Unfortunately having a strong brand just makes you a bigger target in the online marketing/advertising world. Right now, both employees and competitors are finding ways to capitalize on your hard work so it’s time to educate yourself on how to Police your brand on PPC and fight back.

Affiliate programs can be a great source for low cost conversions and further extend your reach. What you don’t know is that your affiliates are probably utilizing your brand name or long tail branded keywords in a PPC account. Now instead of getting a very cheap branded conversion in your PPC account you are going to pay a more expensive commission to your affiliate program. Additionally your ad could be showing at the same time as your Affiliates driving up your CPC by competing against yourself! To combat this problem always keep an eye out for ads that are not yours but look very similar.

If you find a suspicious ad use the HTTP header plug-in for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829) and look for a unique 6 character publisher ID. Report these ID’s (the entire url below) to your affiliate manager and have them penalize or suspend affiliates who poach on your PPC account.

Competitors on PPC can also drive up the CPC of your branded terms by bidding on your branded terms. The most damaging of these competitors are the ones who have a business similar to yours. They are trying to use your branded keyword traffic to steal sales! Not only will they bid on your branded keywords, but they could also try to create ands to confuse people who intend to be your customer. To combat this work with your search engine to see that your trademark is protected. The rules vary by search engine but if you file a trademark form and follow through with complaints you should be able to clean up your branded PPC space. By doing this you can ensure yourself the cheapest CPC possible which in turn should lower the CPA of your entire account.

By carefully watching your ads and working with your PPC search engines you can easily police your Brand and ensure all your hard work is not lining someone else’s pockets. Depending on how bad your situation is you could save as much as 80% on your cost per conversion for branded terms. Cost savings you can apply to other high cost non branded campaigns.

Once you’ve managed to take back your brand on Paid Search you can start saving your good name on Social Media networks. Check back on our blog next month for Take Back Your Brand Part II: Social Media.

Bryan Connally
Internet Marketing Specialist

2009 was a big year for Facebook. In May, comScore reported 70.2 million US unique visits for Facebook (up 97% year over year) passing Myspace .com for the first time. Later the same year, UK based analytics firm Hitwise tweeted that on December 29th Facebook had more unique visits than Google.com. This effectively made facebook.com the most visited site in the US for several consecutive days. While marketers are still debating social media best practices, no one can deny that Facebook is becoming a more important marketing medium every day.

How do start advertising on Facebook?
Of all of the ways you can choose to start advertising on Facebook, PPC is probably both the quickest and the easiest. To begin you will need to decide whether you want your ads to link to your company web page or something on Facebook (like a Page, Application, Group, or Event). Much of this depends on your business goals (lead generation, sales, etc.), but more on that later. Next, you will need a compelling 110px X 80px image for your advertisement. Once you have uploaded the image, written the ad copy, and setup your account (with billing info, etc.) you can literally be up and running in as little as a few hours. The thing that takes the longest time is usually waiting for Facebook to approve your advertisement.

How is PPC Different on Facebook?
Deciding to undertake PPC on Facebook is not exactly the same as doing PPC on more traditional channels like Google, Yahoo, and Bing/MSN. While in theory it is structured very similarly, in application it can be very different. One of the biggest differences tends to really change the way you architect your campaigns. On Facebook, keywords take a back seat to more general, albeit powerful, targeting options. While you can target your audience by location as with other channels, you can also target by relationship status, interests, education, workplace, sex, age, and language. You can still target via keywords, however, manipulating these categories is really the primary method of segmenting your audience. Remember, users do not search on Facebook.

Is Facebook advertising right for you?
Determining if Facebook is right for you is really a question about business goals. Facebook is best for branding, public relations, building buzz, and keeping your customers engaged with your company. It is not really designed to be a lead generation or order driving channel. However, that is not to say that Facebook is incapable of driving incremental revenue, only that it is not as simple as ‘segment, click, and convert’.

Unlike banner advertising, which is really a push method, and PPC advertisements, which are really more of a pull method of advertising, Facebook PPC is a little bit of both. The demographic targeting really allows you to target your viewers with such precision that you can craft very personal messages, but you still have no idea what stage of buying cycle or frame of mind they are in. Instead, you are making inferences about their wants and needs based on demographic and psychographic information.

So how do you drive incremental revenue via Facebook? If you have a fan page or a group for your company on Facebook, you’re half way there. If you update your page frequently (or even if you just have your site RSS feed post to your Facebook) driving fans via Facebook PPC can be a very effective use of your advertising dollars. Not only do your fans keep informed about company news but we find they often convert at later dates. As your fan page or group reaches a kind of a critical mass it can add an additional stream of revenue that can provide a nice boost to your company’s bottom line.

What Facebook needs to do better
While Facebook as a network is already very advanced especially for users and social networking, the interface and tools available for advertisers are still very much in their infancy. There are several things that Facebook PPC needs to fix before it can expect really compete for serious advertising dollars.

First, Facebook (unlike its more traditional PPC rivals) has no pixel technology to track conversions. Therefore if you decide to advertise on Facebook and direct users to an outside site, you have no way to seeing within the Facebook interface which advertisements or campaigns led to sales and conversions. While you can ascertain the general performance of the channel so long as you set everything up correctly in your analytics package and track things carefully it is hard to evaluate the performance of more granular aspects of your campaigns like ad copy and offers.

Second, Facebook’s reporting capabilities still have a long way to go. As of right now, the reporting is often delayed by 24 hours or more and even then the data does not exist in the account forever. Instead the most you can see is the last couple of months. If you are not diligent about exporting your reports and keeping them organized on your desktop your data will eventually be gone.

Conclusion
At the end of the day Facebook is like every other new channel and medium. While it is a game changer, it also has certain strengths and weaknesses that first need to be understood and then leveraged. Only in doing this can companies successfully integrate it into their overall marketing initiatives. If you are thinking about experimenting with Facebook now is definitely the time to get started. I fully expect Facebook to become a more and more important medium in this coming year.

Bryan Connally
Internet Marketing Specialist

While many of clients I work with already have established and highly successful PPC campaigns, they are still looking for more ways of driving additional traffic and revenue. Since most of the time these clients already run highly targeted campaigns with proven ad copy and robust conversion rates, finding additional sources of traffic and revenue can be a challenging proposition.  It is at this time I usually suggest implementing some sort of Call Reporting solution as an important part in identifying undiscovered areas of potential.

How Does Call Reporting Work?

Call Reporting is not only quick to setup, but it is also easily integrated into your current PPC campaigns. Basically, call tracking works by placing a unique phone number on anything from a landing page to a PPC text advertisement.  When the trackable number is called, important call data are collected, such as the duration and time of day of the call, and made available in a special report accessible at anytime. Depending on the robustness of your call tracking solution, you can also track the geographic location that originated the call, the outcome of the call, or even record the conversation. Since call reporting doesn’t have any major upfront cost, it is a powerful and inexpensive way to measure the ROI of any online advertising initiative.

Why is Call Reporting Important?

Along with some of the features mentioned above, Call Reporting is also important for tracking customer contacts that otherwise might not be tied back to the paid search channel. There is significant evidence to support the fact that many users may find your company by a PPC advertisement or online search, but use another channel to actually contact your business. This is nowhere more important than for businesses with local storefronts or clients that have geo-targeted PPC campaigns.  In fact, The Kelsey Group has reported that 86% of search engine users search for local products and services online.  Furthermore, according to a study by TMP Directional Marketing in conjunction with comScore, the two most common activities following an online local search are a phone call or a visit to a local store.

Not Just for Local Businesses

Call Reporting, however, is just as important for both large and niche B2B clients that are primarily interested in lead generation. This is true for several reasons. By implementing Call Reporting on your website, you provide visitors multiple ways to contact your company. Research shows that while many B2B visitors may be interested in your services, they are often not yet willing to provide their contact information to a web-to-lead form. By allowing them to call a number you setup, you provide them with the ability to call at a time of their choosing and in the method they prefer. Internal Parallel Path data has also shown that this can be an important contributor to overall campaign ROI.

Is Call Reporting Right for my Business?

It is not necessary to be a large multinational brand or have an extensive network of local brick and mortar stores to be an ideal candidate for Call Reporting. Rather, we suggest it for nearly all of our clients. Call Reporting is an established technology that, regardless of the level of functionality you need, whether it be full service tracking down to the individual keyword level or something more basic, Parallel Path can guide you in selecting the solution that is right for you.

Lora Baker
Internet Marketing Specialist

For a Technical Writing class back in 1996, one of my homework assignments involved looking up eight different well-known phrases on six different search engines. This was before the days when students all had laptops, so I trudged over to the library to start my assignment. I wasn’t even 100% certain what the internet was, and had no idea what a search engine was, but even back then it was not hard to figure out. All I remember about the assignment was this; after five fruitless searches on five useless search engines, I came to my last one – Yahoo. Begrudgingly, I typed in www.yahoo.com, and was astounded to find that every single phrase on my list produced a list of results on Yahoo. My world had been forever altered. From that day on, any research or information that I needed came from Yahoo or later, other search engines.

Internet-savvy companies probably used Yahoo even back then to sell products. Thirteen years later, search engines have changed the way that most companies market themselves and their products. The internet has gone from an almost unknown entity to become the number one way most people find information. As a result, many companies have found that online marketing is an excellent addition to traditional marketing methods for introducing their business to the world.

There are two main methods utilized in Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The first method is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing. With PPC, businesses bid on keywords (or phrases) through search engine sites (such as Google and Yahoo), and these keywords elevate that business’ ad about their product to the first page of the search results so that their ad will display on the top or to the right of the natural search listings, in the “Sponsored Listings” sections). Each time someone clicks on their ad, that business is charged a ‘click’ charge based on their keyword bid and the competition of the keyword. For example; Percept Technology Labs, a hardware testing and compliance lab, bid on the phrase “consumer electronics product test lab.” Anytime someone searches for the term “consumer electronics product test lab” on Google, Percept’s ad appears on the top or to the right of the natural search results.

The other method frequently associated with SEM is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search Engine Optimization involves designing an entire page on your website based around one or two keywords, phrases or topics. The goal of SEO is to have your website appear on the first page of the search results in one of the top natural search listings. When a user clicks a natural search listing (as opposed to one of the sponsored search listings), there is no cost to the company. The trick of SEO is building your website the right way, and then changing it often enough so that the search engines continue to find it relevant to the keyword(s) you are targeting. Research has shown that close to 70% of searchers will click on a natural search result, while the other 30% click on Sponsored Search Listings. This statistic alone should encourage companies to focus on SEO along with PPC.

What is so important on the search results page (particularly page one), is real estate. The more times that your company name displays on this results page after a relevant keyword to your company has been typed in, the more likely a customer will click to your site. So, for Percept Technology Labs, if a user searches on “consumer electronics product test lab,” the ideal result would be to appear not only in the sponsored listings, but high in the natural listings as well. If the user sees Percept at the top of the page, and then again in the top of the natural search listings, the likelihood of that user clicking on a Percept link climbs upward of 85% (? -help here please). Displaying in both the sponsored listing as well as the natural listing shows the relevancy of your company to the keyword that the user searched on.

Today, Yahoo still exists as a search engine, although it’s not the premier engine that it may have been back in the late 90s. The search engine concept has definitely changed the way that companies increase their customer base. As companies struggle to increase, or even maintain business in a weakening economy, internet marketing is an important aspect of a complete marketing effort. By using both PPC advertising and Search Engine Optimization in your internet marketing efforts, you are giving your company the best exposure you can on the internet.