Google recently sent out emails alerting everyone that the old version of Analytics reporting will end in June 2012. We see the good in the new Analytics and there is a lot more data to play with. However, this is a headache because all of the automatic reports you set up in the old Analytics will need to be made again in the new Analytics. This is good news and bad news. It’s good because it gives you the opportunity to revisit your dashboard and customize it. Unfortunately for agencies this is bad news because all of the hundreds of reports we have automated will be gone! We encourage our clients to log into their Analytics and get familiar with the data. This is the perfect time for them to customize their dashboards to display the data they’re most interested in seeing.
If you need a little help getting started we’ve simplified it for you — 3 Quick Steps to Set Up Email Reports in the New Google Analytics

Writing PPC ads can be fun – using your brain to shoehorn great messaging into a limited number of characters is like doing puzzles. The parts of the copy-creation process that get really tedious are the repetitive acts – checking character count obsessively, combing the text to make sure your capitalization preferences are followed, appending the same word over and over.

There’s good news, though – Excel has some handy features you can use to streamline those mind-numbing steps. Here are my four favorite ad copy time-savers (they work for keywords, too):

1.       Length Formula

If you’re writing or customizing a significant number of text ads, create an extra column to the right of any ad text component to automatically measure length (i.e. the number of characters, including spaces, in the cell). Type in =LEN(cell), where cell is simply the cell whose characters you want to count. This feature makes it easy to see if you’re hitting the character count limits for Headline, Description Line 1, Description Line 2, or Display URL in AdWords. You can easily copy the formula down multiple rows and use conditional formatting (see #2) to quickly flag any cells over the limit.

2.       Conditional Formatting

It would be impossible to go into all the conditional formatting options in such a short blog post, so I’ll stick to the two main uses for ad text and keyword builds. First off, we can use the “Greater Than…” option to flag any ad text lines that exceed the specified limits. Go to “Conditional Formatting” > “Highlight Cells Rules” >  “Greater Than….” and enter your max limit in the dialog box that appears.

The screenshot below shows that the last two headlines exceed the 25-character max. As I modify the text of the headlines, both the length count and the conditional formatting will automatically update.

You can also use the “Less Than…” option if you want to identify ad text components that are significantly below the character limit. For example, you may want to flag any Description Line with fewer than 20 characters – perhaps there is additional, relevant text that can be added to use up more of the real estate and enhance the message you are trying to deliver.

Another useful conditional formatting tool is “Duplicate Values…” which is also found in the “Highlight Cells Rules” section. You can use the “Duplicate Values…” option to flag repeated keywords in keyword builds, duplicate ad text, etc. In the screenshot below, the two headlines flagged in green are duplicates.

3.       Capitalization Functions

Another useful feature for ad text is the “proper” function, which capitalizes the first letter of each word in a cell. Type in =proper(cell) to use this function.

There are a couple things to consider when using “proper.” First of all, the output appears in the cell where you place the formula, and the output itself is a formula. In order to manipulate it, you’ll need to copy and paste as special (values). You may want to paste it back into the cell with the original text, so you maintain the headers (“Description Line 1” in the example above). The other thing to keep in mind is that acronyms (such as PPC) will be modified so that only the first letter is capitalized. You’ll need to go back and fix any acronyms – fortunately a simple find/replace can do the trick.

There are additional capitalization functions that may be useful, depending on your preferences for keywords, ad group names, and ad text. The “lower” function makes every word lowercase, and the “upper” function makes all letters capitalized.

4.       Concatenate

The last feature I’ll hit on today is “concatenate,” which allows you to join the contents of two or more cells and/or cells plus text. For ads, “concatenate” is a great tool for appending tracking parameters to destination URLs, or for adding text to existing ads, among other things. For example, if you want to run an ad test with the word “Free” added to the beginning of every headline, the concatenate function would let you do this easily in Excel.

Note that, like the “proper” and “lower” functions, the output is placed in another cell and needs to be copied and pasted as values in order to manipulate the text.

Another great use for “concatenate” is to append the plus sign before broad match modifier keywords – however, it will only append the sign to the first token in a keyword. For the remaining tokens, simply use find/replace to find spaces and replace with space and plus sign.

There are several more functions and tools in Excel that will make your life as a search engine marketer much easier, but these are some of my favorites for ad text creation (and they can be handy for keyword builds, too).

Do you have any to add? Leave a comment!

Facts dispel fear (or at worst justify it and indicate a path towards greener pastures), so I wanted to distill what we know to date with hard quantitative data. Surprisingly the answer is not-a-whole-lot, and what we do have comes from just a couple sources.

A chart produced by SEOmoz shows that “the impact of Penguin was immediate and substantial”, with over 3% of Top Ten Rankings in their analysis changing (versus the ~2.7% change caused by the Panda update on April 19th).

Untold quantities of keyboards have rendered the phrases key-word-stuffing and over-optimized-anchor-text in hypotheses about what Penguin is doing. However, MicrositeMasters had unique access to a fabulously large data set and produced the only set of charts I could find showing detailed effects of Penguin.

 

Findings & Action Items from MicrositeMasters

1. Keyword-Stuffing in Anchor Text: Only sites with over 60% of anchor texts containing “money” keywords matching incoming links were negatively affected by Penguin.

A money keyword generates a lot of search traffic. Guzman defines it as a high-volume search term or phrase with a Google rank of roughly 5-15. In other words, the Penguin is looking for you if over half of your traffic is driven by searches using high-volume keywords that exactly match your anchor texts.

Action Item: Unless your incoming link anchor texts were totally dominated by high-volume search keywords, this component of the Penguin Algorithm is not hurting your site.

2. URLs in Anchor Text: Penguin is going to hit you for stuffing URLs in your anchor texts, but not near as much as money-keyword stuffing (far right in chart below).

Action Item: Reduce your URL-stuffing, but take care of the keyword-stuffing First!

3. Relevant (Niche) Inbound Links: Having links from websites outside of your niche is okay, as long as you have some from relevant websites, too.

I made this chart by eye-balling the numbers in a pair of charts from the MicrositeMasters study. The chart shows two things:

i) It doesn’t matter if you have a high or low percent of inbound links from websites with content that is relevant to yours, as long as you have SOME quality, niche inbound links: websites with low percentage (10%) of same-niche inbound links were penalized at the same rate as sites with high percentage (60-100%) of relevant inbound links.

ii) It matters a LOT if you have NO relevant inbound links – the red bars show that about half of websites with 0% of relevant inbound links were penalized. Once you have even 10% of your links coming from quality, relevant sites though, Penguin isn’t penalizing you for having non-niche links too.

Action Item: Make sure you have some inbound links from quality, relevant websites.

That’s not easy – and it’s part of the point of Penguin: good content creation and targeted community development around your site is harder than typing a keyword into 20 anchor texts. Countless blog posts offer advice on building a quality community (inbound links from websites with good content related to your site). Here are a few tidbits from Brownrigg’s insights on generating a community for your website.

i) Post quality articles relevant to your niche (that people will want to repost on their site).

ii) Compile some of your articles into an ebook.

iii) Publish your articles on sites like digg and submit them to article directories.

Post-Penguin Reality

Penguin seems to have a fairly narrow target – keyword-over-optimized text anchors and disproportionate inbound links from irrelevant websites: in other words, it has effectively removed shortcuts for generating website traffic. In general, however, and despite the apocalyptic rhetoric out there, the new Sheriff should leave the world with a lot of well-deserved winners – people creating genuinely good content and generating traffic with honest “white-hat” methods that ultimately benefit the 2,267,233,742 people searching for content on the World Wide Web.

Image from cognitiveseo.com/blog

A Medium Marketers Can’t Ignore: In 3 Charts

1) Pinterest is a $7.7 Billion Company, and “appeals to college-educated females between the ages of 25 to 44. A sweet demographic known for its spending decisions and habits.”

2) From Q2 2011 to now, Pinterest has grown from representing 1.2% of social media revenue for e-commerce sites to 17.4%, and it generates greater revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter.

3) Pinterest drives more referral traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+, and its share of total social media referrals is growing.

OK. So I can’t ignore it. What’s it going to cost me? 

TIME    91% of marketers report using social media, and over half of these are spending 6+ hours a week doing it.  A good blog post requires a lot of research because it contains a lot of content, and both Facebook and Twitter involve conversations with consumers that need to be monitored. Pinterest, however, is sometimes described as the next phase in social media – content is not (time consumingly) generated, but curated –  “Pinterest offers a new level of fun and interaction for our customers as they work with us to create and curate content.” Because you are using content you already have, content created by others, and your followers are adding to and refining your content, Pinterest lessens the burden of time investment required by other social media platforms.

MONEY    The chart below is one I created by compiling statistics from several sources, and averaging over the ranges given by various sources. For example, one company is selling Repins for $0.75, one blogger devised an algorithm to calculate the value of a repin, and Twitter and Facebook statistics were found elsewhere. Any of these stats are highly contested, industry-specific, and involve huge ranges, but the take home is that Pinterest is relatively cheap and appears to generate a healthy return on the investment.

So how do I do it?

It’s profitable and efficient, so how can you optimize your Pinterest board to increase brand/ product awareness and traffic to your site? Neocloudmarketing reiterates the standard adage for all content creation: show your consumer the “whole package” – how your product is used, the lifestyle and how it intersects with other brands and products on the market – ie, give content that goes beyond your product and is useful to your consumers. Social Media Examiner recommends researching how your followers are interacting with your board – which pins are they re-pinning, what information can you get about your followers’ interests by looking at what they pin on their own boards? There are also resources for creating the images that will entice users.

The great thing about Pinterest is that you don’t need several paragraphs – just a picture.

Claim Any Listings Floating Around the Web

The first thing you should do as a business owner is be sure to “claim” your local listings so you can have full control over the details and this also enables you to respond to reviews as a business owner. Popular review sites you should search for your business listing on include Google Places, Yelp, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Smile Reminder (doctor reviews), Angie’s List, Kudzu and MerchantCircle.
Chances are you already have a listing on one of the above sites just waiting to be claimed.

Respond Online and Take it Offline

Once your listings are claimed they are ready to be monitored. And this is where the main point of this blog entry begins! You must respond to reviews, good and bad. The one thing our clients seem to be most confused about is how to address the bad reviews. Well, here are some tips to follow:
1. Do not respond “in the moment.” You may feel heated when you first read a negative review so step back and think about your response before you respond angrily. This is the time to take in some constructive criticism (assuming it’s a legit review).
2. Once you’re ready to respond, start off positive. Here’s an example of how to positively start your response, “We are open to all feedback from clients, as we believe it helps us adjust to better serve our clients.”
3. You should also discuss how you tried to resolve the issue (if you did) or how you plan on resolving the issue.
4. End the response by giving your contact information.

Be Known For Your Excellent Customer Service and Responsiveness

One of the companies I most admire for their customer service is ModCloth. They encourage customer feedback and will respond to any negative product reviews in a very personable way. They refer to the reviewer by name and make it known that they appreciate the feedback. Here are some screen shots of the great customer service I’ve witnessed on ModCloth:

Dave Underwood of Topspot Internet Marketing spoke on “Improving Website Measurement & Analytics” at the HiMA luncheon last week in Houston, Texas.

He offered useful insight for successful marketing, some of it surprisingly simple. For example, recording and listening to phone calls: if your sales people give inaccurate information or fail in some other way to appropriately respond to potential customers, it really doesn’t matter if your marketing campaign generates 100 leads from Fortune 500 companies – the sales people are not converting the leads.

He also touched on the hot topic of Organic vs. Paid advertising. Agreeing with a study by Google showing that 89% of the clicks generated by paid ads would not be generated by organic search*, he recommends maintaining a PPC campaign even when your Organic rank is high.

In other words:

People need to see your company lots of times, in lots of places (PPC and search lists), and they need to keep seeing your company show up over time.

* Clearly Google is incentivized to present their findings in a way that encourages companies to pay for advertising, and indeed analysts point out the limitations of Google’s interpretation of their results (Google presents an average rate of Incremental Ad Clicks unique to PPC, and doesn’t explicitly talk about the fact that lower IAC means your PPC is “cannibalizing” more of your organic clicks). In general though, there’s over half a century of robust research demonstrating the familiarity effect, so shelling out for those paid ads is probably worth it for your company.

Last month I wrote about a few ways to use Google’s AdWords Desktop Editor to more efficiently manage campaigns in Google AdWords. This month I’ll share some of my favorite tricks in the Microsoft adCenter Desktop Editor program, starting with two of the same things I highlighted in Google AdWords Editor: advanced bid changes and copying campaign settings. Just like Google’s AdWords Editor, the Microsoft adCenter Desktop Editor lets you make changes to your adCenter PPC campaigns offline and post those changes live after you’ve had a chance to Q/A your work. The Microsoft Desktop Editor also allows you to do some bulk changes that cannot be done in the adCenter UI, so it’s a great time-saver. While adCenter Desktop program doesn’t have all of the functionality of Google’s AdWords Desktop Editor, it’s come a long way in the last several months. I’m excited to see what additional features they’ll roll out in 2012.

Here are three of my favorite tools in Microsoft’s adCenter Desktop editor:

1.       Advanced Bid Changes

If you find yourself wanting to increase or decrease bids on multiple keywords in one fell swoop, look for the “Change bids” button at the bottom of the adCenter Desktop tool. Note that you can only find this option in the Keywords tab for adCenter, unlike the “Advanced bid changes” option found in multiple tabs of AdWords Editor. (Fingers crossed, the “Change bids” button will soon show up on adCenter’s Ad Groups tab as well!)

To change bids, simply select the keywords that need adjusted bids, and then click on “Change bids”

As in AdWords Editor, the pop-up box lets you choose to increase or decrease bids by a certain percentage amount or dollar amount. You can also choose to “Set bid no higher than” or “Set bid no lower than” a certain amount.

2.       Copying Campaign Settings

There’s now an easy way to copy campaign targeting settings from an existing campaign and paste them into one or more additional campaigns in adCenter. The following campaign settings can be copied: Locations, Day of Week, Time of Day, Demographics, and Devices.

To do this, simply right-click on the campaign whose settings you need to copy and then select “Copy” from the menu. Right-click on one or more campaigns into which you want to copy the settings. Select “Paste special” from the menu. A pop-up box will then give you the option to “Paste settings only,” and any available settings will appear on the right-hand side. Select the settings you want to paste (in this case, “Targeting”).

Double-check the campaign settings in one of your edited campaigns, and they should match the settings you copied over – much easier than going in and adjusting each of those settings manually!

3.       Change Target Settings (Multiple Campaigns)

The trick above is great if you have a campaign that already contains the settings you want to add to other campaigns. But if you need to apply the same brand-new settings to multiple campaigns, here’s what you can do.

Start by selecting all of the campaigns you want to apply the settings to, and then click on the “Targeting” button at the bottom of the “Campaigns” tab. A pop-up box will appear that gives the option of modifying: Exclusions (websites and keywords), Locations, Day of Week, Time of Day, Demographics, and Device.

You can modify any or all of these settings, and they will be applied to all selected campaigns. This is great when you’re launching or modifying several campaigns at once.

The adCenter Desktop Editor is still somewhat behind AdWords Editor in terms of functionality, but if you’re spending any amount of time in adCenter, knowing the efficiency-based features is vital. If you have suggestions for features you’d like to see added in the Desktop Editor, leave a comment!

That is Tendenci allows you to easily edit SEO tags like Meta, Alt tags, and Title tags directly from the interface (no coding required).

If you have a Tendenci site and would like know how to easily optimize your site for search engines be sure to review her slide presentation.

Learn more about the SEO features of Tendenci including:

1. The automatic SEO features of Tendenci, and how you can best take advantage of them
2. What custom SEO features are available in Tendenci
3. Tips for optimizing content like pages, articles, photos, news releases, etc.

AdWords Editor is a go-to tool for anyone managing large accounts or campaigns in Google AdWords. But even if you’re only dealing with small campaigns, it’s worth checking out this free tool from Google. AdWords Editor allows you to make bulk changes to individual or multiple campaigns – changes that cannot be made easily through the AdWords UI. As an added bonus, all of this is done offline so you can easily revert errors or unwanted changes before posting anything live. In this post, I’ll outline some of my favorite AdWords Editor tools.

1.       Advanced Bid Changes

Let’s say you’re nearing the month’s end and you find yourself with some budget to spare. Among other things, you may decide to increase bids across the board or across top-performing campaigns, ad groups, keywords, or placements. In the AdWords UI, you have the option of copying a particular bid from one keyword (for example) to several others on the page. In the screenshot below, the up/down arrows next to the $0.25 max CPC indicate I’m copying that bid to the other selected keywords.

So that’s useful if I want the same value for each keyword. But what if I have different bids for different keywords, and I want to increase all of them by 25%? That’s where the Advanced Bid Changes option in AdWords Editor comes in handy. To find it, go to the tab where you need to make bid changes (Keywords, Placements, Audiences, or Ad Groups). Select the data you need to adjust, and then click on the link below to “Advanced bid changes”.

The pop-up box gives you the option to increase or decrease bids by a certain percentage amount or dollar amount. You also have the option of setting minimum or maximum caps on bids. And as always, since you’re working in AdWords Editor, you can easily revert or modify any bid changes that seem out of whack prior to posting the changes live to your account.

2.       Copying Campaign Settings

At PPC Associates, we are constantly reviewing performance across different geos and different times (day of week, hour of day) for our accounts to look for additional optimization opportunities. Unfortunately, we can only apply hour of day bid adjustments or custom geos in the UI at this time, but we can use AdWords Editor to easily copy these specialized targeting settings to multiple campaigns.

Here’s how to do it: In the Campaigns tab, select the campaign that already has the targeting settings you need (this assumes you have already clicked on “Get recent changes” in AdWords Editor to download the settings you created in the UI). Right click on the campaign and select “Copy campaign shell.”  Alternatively, you can go to “Edit” à “Copy campaign shell.” This automatically copies the following settings: Devices, Ad schedule, Language targeting, and Location Targeting. Now you can go to any other campaign in that account in AdWords Editor, and simply click on “Paste” next to any of those four settings to copy over the targeting.

I should note that you can copy campaign settings fairly easily in the AdWords UI, as shown in the screenshot below. However, I still prefer working in AdWords Editor whenever possible, since it reduces the potential for errors.

3.       Custom View (Advanced search)

Finally, the Custom View option (also called Advanced search). This powerful tool lets you apply multiple filters based on campaign or ad group name, words contained in ad text or URLs, performance statistics, status, and more. We use this tool often to QA our work prior to posting, especially when making complex changes in bulk. To find the tool, either click on “Advanced search” in the top right of any tab, or use the “View” drop-down menu to find “Create or set custom view…”

Once you’re in the custom view, add as many filters as needed. For example, if I’ve recently appended destination URLs with a new tracking parameter (CUSTOMCMPGN) and want to easily identify any URLs missing the parameter, I change the settings to “Destination URL” “doesn’t contain” “CUSTOMCMPN.” But maybe that new parameter is only used for ad groups containing the word “free.” I can add a second filter for “Ad group name” “doesn’t contain” “free.” And if I’m only concerned with active ad groups? In the “Status” section, I check the box next to “Enabled” and nothing else. The results will be ads from active ad groups, not containing the word “free” in the name, and missing the new parameter.

Fluency with AdWords Editor does more than let you work on your accounts offline; it’ll save you tons of time with its advanced tools – and it’ll save you the time and headaches of troubleshooting errors pushed live directly from the AdWords UI. It’s arguably one of the most indispensable tool of all SEMs, from beginners to 10-year vets.