We work on a lot of different things and it’s easy to get yourself caught up in the "I want our business to offer everything". I overheard someone getting a quote from someone outside our company for something and I asked the person next to me "Why aren't we doing that internally? We've done it before and we easily could". The person then rattled off a bunch of high profile, very important projects and a reminder of our current staffing levels. And of course my reply was "yeah, but we could do that". And then the person said something, without any earlier mention to the context that came through loud and clear.

"Those aren't the Cool Ranch Tacos, that’s like the side of beans, focus on the Cool Ranch Tacos."

For those living under a rock, Taco Bell had a smashing success with the Doritos Locos Tacos, blowing their projected numbers out of the water, just crazy success levels, according to one report approximately 1M were sold per day since being introduced to the market. From a non-sales perspective, the menu addition added 15000 new jobs related due to the product alone. They then immediately followed up with the natural successor, the Cool Ranch Tacos. Everyone who likes a taco that I've talked to is super excited to try them, just the thought conjures up a tasty sensation for the pallet.

Then there's the beans, how could you possibly have a Taco Bell without beans? The answer is "you couldn't", they're obviously incredibly vital to Taco Bell.

But let’s face it, when's the last time that someone said "hey, have you heard about those beans at Taco Bell, they're awesome and we all need some." No, it’s just not going to happen despite us all agreeing that beans are a crucial staple to the Taco Bell experience.

I'm sure Taco Bell has big awards and kudos conventions like every company... and who's going to get all of the kudos and rewards this year: The guy focused on the Cool Ranch Tacos or the Beans?

And while in 5 years, the Doritos Taco product owner may have moved on to something new and great, the beans guy is probably still focusing on how to drive even lower costs on production line of a product that's been worked on and optimized already year-after-year-after-year.

Which brings me back to our business... when time and resources are a factor and you're working with people who are wowed by the latest and greatest, which then drives your follow-up projects: You can either focus on the Cool Ranch Tacos or the side of beans, and at this point in our businesses lifecycle the Cool Ranch Tacos seem like a lot more fun.

“How do my ads compare to others in the search auction?” Have you heard that question before as a marketing manager? In the world of paid search, competition is everything, every click, impression, and conversion drives the business. As such, any marketer wants to know how they stack up against the competition.

A few months ago, Google Adwords and Bing Ads opened up their competitive metrics, to share insights into how your ads and keywords are performing against other advertisers in that same space. This is called, “Impression Share” or “Share of Voice” in Google and Bing, respectively. Impression share is the impressions you've received divided by the estimated number of impressions you were eligible to receive. Simply put, how much of the time was my ad being shown, compared to how many times it could have received an impression.

This is a great overall indicator of the performance headroom in each ad group and campaign. Allowing you to garner a high level overview of your performance, and see if there are opportunities.

Great, right? Well, yes, but it doesn’t tell you enough. That is where your “Lost Impressions due to Ad Rank” steps in. This is an actionable number, because you can control your ad rank through a variety of levers.

Quick recap, what is ad rank? How well your ad has performed overtime, in combination with Quality Score. Quality Score is the combination of a few metrics: Click Through Rate (CTR), Account History, Display URL performance, landing page relevance, and other “black box” numbers that Google and Bing won’t share. Keeping in mind, you can change these parts of your account through some hard work and analysis.

With Impression Share, you can get a quick glance to your performance, and making sure that each day, you’re getting the most out of your account, and the most out of each query. Bing and Google make it easy to view this metric now, so take advantage of it!

For other important pay per click marketing metrics, take a look at my other blog post!

Conversions are the most sought after end-goal for most online advertisers; it declares that their efforts have worked. These often come at a cost, and require hours of effort and optimization to ensure maximum efficiency. But there is one conversion that is so simple and so efficient, that it doesn’t even catch our eye.

The Facebook comment. Go ahead, login to your Facebook, look at your newsfeed, and see what appears under a status update. It is your profile picture and a box for you to offer your wisdom to your friends in the form of a comment. This is the most efficient conversion online.

Why? Because Facebook needs and wants you to engage with your friends, that is why you’re there, right? You see your image, you see yourself already there. Facebook allows provides you everything you need to make that final conversion, you just have to come up with a clever comment. Every time you click a like, or comment on a picture or update, you are fueling Facebook. You are converting and adding value to their Friend Graph.

The takeaway from this example is that is that the use can “see themselves there,” they know what to expect, and they know what they’ll get.

Which metrics are best in SEM.

There are so many numbers and metrics available with online marketing and advertising. So much so - that marketing jobs are now considered to be the “new finance jobs.” The reality is that every dollar spent through online advertising can be tracked and accounted for. In SEM, what are the key top-level metrics that you should focus on for optimizing your adCenter or AdWords campaigns.

1.       Click Through Rate [CTR]: The basic.
CTR is simple, how many clicks per impressions did your ad/keyword receive.

Why it is important: CTR is a good measure of your ad’s effectiveness. How well does your ad catch the eye? This metric is good for testing ad copy. Learn to love it.

2.       Conversion Rate: The start of something good.
Conversion rate requires that you have conversion tracking enabled on your landing pages [which you should]. Assuming you do: Conversion rate tells you how many conversions occur per click received on your ad.
Why it is important: Conversion rate is indicative of your landing page’s performance. Does the user get the expected landing page when clicking on an ad served by their query? Your landing page is an opportunity to sell your company or service. Don’t go over the top, but be thoughtful on your content.

3.       Conversions Per Impression [CPI]: The overall indicator.
CPI is simple enough, per given impression – how many conversions were received. This tells you how well your:  keyword matches the query, which meets the user’s expectation/intent, that directs them to a landing page that resonates, and results in a conversion.

Why it is important:  By quickly doing this analysis, you can get an overall health check of your SEM campaigns. By itself, it isn’t indicative of any one symptom. But if measure overtime, you can tell if overall performance is improving or decreasing. Note: neither adCenter nor AdWords UI provide this metric, time to bust out the calculator.

4.       Exact Match Impression Share: Me vs. the World. 
Exact Match Impression Share is the percentage of impressions for an exact query that your keyword matches, and displays on the paid portion of the search engine results page [SERP].

Why it is important: This metric provides insight into how well your campaigns are faring against your competitors. If you’re below 100%, then you Quality Score or budget could be holding you back.

These are four extremely important metrics, but which is the best? Answer: All of them. No one single metric can diagnose if something is going well, or not. That is why all must be consider. If your CPI is low, and your Exact Match Impression Share is large, the CTR will likely be low, as such, you should change your ad copy or revisit your landing page. If you CTR in high, but your CPI is low, time to test new landing pages. In short, think of each metric’s strength, and how another metric can fill in the remaining gaps. In tandem, all of these metrics will ensure success.  

SEO your LinkedIn Profile

If you love what you do, it doesn’t stop after you leave work. I love search, and I’m always looking to try something new. As such, I turned to my LinkedIn profile.

I’ll be honest, since starting at Exsilio, I hadn’t really touched my LinkedIn profile – like most that aren’t looking for a new job, it gathered a little dust. I decided that I could test some techniques to increase my performance on LinkedIn search.

Here is what I did:

- Increased the use of industry keywords in my descriptions of past positions and personal summary. I researched by looking at profiles of people in mid-level roles [because they’re still looking to move up in a company and presumably care about their LinkedIn profile]

- Joined 40 groups relevant to my industry, and other’s that interested me.

Here is why those two steps are important:

LinkedIn uses a modified character-based search [keywords], just like Google & Bing. To show up in a search related to your industry, you need to have industry terms. Simple, right?

Groups - who cares?!

Joining groups is important because it creates a connection to people outside of your network, regardless if you’ve ever worked or connected with them.

Example: A small business is looking for a SEM professional - they search for that term in LinkedIn. Because we both share “small businesses of Seattle” as a group on LinkedIn, I will show up in their search results, even though we have no other connections.

In addition, I chose to update my headline to reflect the accreditations that I have in the Search industry. Why? Because that is the blurb that people see next to my name in the search results page.

Up Up and Away!

Since implementing these changes, my appearances in LinkedIn search have increase by 283% percent! That is amazing! LinkedIn provides metrics of “How Many Times Have You Appeared In Searches” = your new best friend. Although the data is quite sparse, you can get a good idea of how well your changes are performing.

Since making these changes, I’ve continued to refine my keyword strategy, and am testing how apps and other LinkedIn features. Nothing conclusive yet, but I’ll keep on testing!

I’ve always felt very comfortable walking up to strangers and starting a conversation. 

Since I was very little, my CEO father took me to business meetings with him and forced me to walk up to his friends and say hello – most often, I had never met these people before. Sometimes he would go with me, but usually he would just point to someone, and say “now I want you to go walk up to Mr. so and so and introduce yourself. Shake his hand and make sure to say your full name.” Memories of this go back to when I was five or six.

I remember being very nervous but it always ended well and made my dad happy, which was obviously why I kept doing it.

I hold on to a number of memories like this one, being in professional settings with my dad when I was younger.  Whenever my dad introduced me to someone, he always followed the introduction with the detail of where they were from, and what they did for a living – sometimes he would even remember something about the person’s kids or recent news in the person’s life.

He has a notably exceptional ability to remember nearly everyone he’s met as well as a detail about them, and this was always well received by those he was introducing me to. 
Over the years, meeting what seems like thousands of people when I was with my dad meant that I had many opportunities to sit back and observe my dad interact with someone, or watch someone before I met them.

Sometimes, my dad would tell me to watch someone from across the room, and “read” them. He would ask me later that day what I observed, and teach me things about that person’s personality from what I told him of their demeanor, body language, and sometimes attire.

I’m sure my dad wonders where all of that training went when I started dating, somehow early on in my dating life, those skills didn’t transfer.

What all of those experiences did do for me was make it feel natural to approach people, and be able to have a conversation with nearly anyone. It helped me to feel like everyone I met was a friend, with no pressure to accomplish anything during the conversation other than learn more about each other and have a good time.

I learned the value of humor and letting your own personality come through. People know when someone isn’t being genuine, is trying to put on a façade or is only saying things to get what they want.

This is my advice – be yourself, be interested in getting to know the person you’re talking to, not the reason they are at the meeting, conference, etc. Make your sales pitch or your business need second after getting to know the person, and you’ll find greater success.

Not sure how to start a conversation, or what to say to keep it going? Here are some tips from Fast Company

You’ve done the hard work, you’ve chosen the keywords, dialed in the targeting, and built the landing pages – Google & Bing are ready to serve your ad, and you’re ready for some new customers. But why should a user click on your ad as opposed to another, or even an organic result? Writing a PPC ad is like trying to get a date through a text message, you’ve got to be convincing, and you don’t have a lot of characters to spare. This is the art of SEM, and here are a three proven techniques that will help.

1.       In exact match ad groups, use keywords in ad headline

a.       Because you have spent the time to break down keywords into relevant ad groups, spent the time to make sure the ad copy is relevant. Not only will this increase your CTR, but it will increase your relevance, which will increase your Quality Score on Google & Bing.

2.       Use anxiety in your ad copy

a.       When testing ad copy on a high volume ad group, I tested the core message of that ad – one with anxiety, one without. Guess which worked better?

                                                               i.      “Don’t miss another customer”

                                                             ii.      “Reach millions of customers”

b.      “Don’t miss another customer” had a higher click through rate in all ad groups it was tested.

3.       Dynamic Ad Headlines with broad match ad groups

a.       If you have broad match ad groups, you recognize that your keywords are going to cover a large set of queries.

b.      To help increase CTR in these ad groups, use dynamic text. {KeyWord:PPC Advertising}

                                                               i.      Capitalize the “K” and “W” so that proper case is used when inserting the keyword.

                                                             ii.      Choose a relevant ad title in case keyword is greater than 25 characters. In this case, I used PPC Advertising as the ad title. Assuming that the keywords were relevant to that query.

Now it is time to test. Set both engines to even ad rotation [Google has “experiments” to aid with this], and watch the CTR and conversions. A key metric to understand the true effectiveness of an ad is Conversion Per Impression [CPI = Conversion/Impressions]. It is a true measure of your keyword choice, and ad copy, and landing page quality.

Keep in mind that testing is not a one-time event; it needs to be continually tested and optimized. Don’t be afraid to try something new or bold.  

When I first saw the trailer for the new Ridley Scott film, Prometheus, several months ago, I thought it looked like a pretty good sci-fi film, but I wasn’t “over the moon” excited for it. The film is about a team of explorers that discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey through the universe where they must fight to save the future of the human race. One would think that a film of this magnitude would be able to carry its own weight through the standard release of trailers, clips and website. However, the marketing team had other things in mind.

The first piece of marketing was a TED talk video set in the year 2023 (same time the film is set in). Guy Pierce, playing the CEO of fictional Weyland Industries, describes how he will change the world.  Organizers from TED helped Ridley Scott envision what a TED talk from the future would look like and it comes off really well done.

Next, they released a video about David, a robot from Weyland Industries, where we learn about his emotions and the world he lives in. The video is very cool, for instance the robot in the video is eerily life-like. It feels like something Apple would produce to show off one of its new products.

Finally, there’s the film’s website. The website is designed to be the corporate website for Weyland Industries, complete with product list, about the company, and a career page. In fact, if someone stumbled onto this site without knowing about the film, it could easy fool them into thinking that it was an actual company.

With all of this marketing, including the mystery surrounding the plot, and the fact that this might be a prequel to Alien, movie goers will likely flock to it this summer as the buzz heats up.

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