Organic search marketing, PPC advertising, social media marketing, and Internet marketing consulting

I’m about to make my first foray into Google’s Image Ads, which are contextual ads in standard IAB image ad sizes and formats. I plan to begin with static image ads and then try Flash ads from the Display Ad Builder.

I try not to run blindly into any new ventures, so I set out to find some best practices for image ads. Here’s a quick list of the 7 most important things to remember:

1. Image ads should be in a separate campaign from other search or contextual ads.  This is primarily because image ads have a higher CPC; since they take up the space of three text ads, your bid has to beat the top 3 text ads for that space - combined. Also, ads created in the Display Ad builder apparently can’t be moved to a different campaign, so be sure to put ‘em where you want ‘em to begin with.
2. As with any other contextual campaign, the keywords should describe the websites or pages where you want them to display, not the actual product or service you’re advertising. This is a small but important distinction. Use ad groups to focus on specific themes and specific audiences.
3. Images on the ads should be as eye-catching as possible to distract the user from the content, but please don’t be obnoxious or send anyone into an epileptic seizure. You know the flashing ads I’m talking about — don’t be that advertiser.
4. Text on the image ads should be targeted to conversion. The theory is that the image draws the user in and gets them to click, but the text is what enables conversions. The text should accurately describe your product, service, or the action you want them to take, and ideally it will also match your landing page text. If you can also match keywords in the URL, you may hit the relevance trifecta.
5. Don’t forget to use negative keywords for image ads. Your conversion rate will take a big hit if users think they are getting truffles when you offer chocolate lab puppies.
6. Create ads in many different sizes and formats to accommodate the widest variety of places where your ads might need to fit. Some users report a high success rate in getting 120×600 skyscrapers placed, presumably because it’s an odd-sized space to try to fit things into.
7. Your image ad should follow the rules of any successful contextual ad - connect with the user, showcase your features and benefits, describe what is offered on the landing page, and call the user to action.

Of course, all of this is easy for me to say before actually implementing the ads. I’ll have a followup post once the campaigns are up and running. Please don’t be afraid to comment if you have more to add.

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This is the first in a series of posts on implementing Omniture SiteCatalyst web analytics. I’m writing this because I’ve been through this process several times now, and each time I could have used some helpful hints and tips. I will not give away any Omniture trade secrets here or post any secret code, I just want to make it easier for other people who may be asking the same questions I did. Omniture typically offers a certain number of consulting hours as part of the implementation process, but I recommend saving those for the more technical issues. There is an online knowledge base to refer to, but it actually answers my questions less than 25% of the time. Note that my examples are based on basic implementation without any advanced coding required.

Initial Omniture implementation (they call it “Fusion Engagement”) generally consists of three stages: Define, Design, and Deploy. The Define stage begins with a kickoff call with your assigned Omniture consultant. This person will  work with you throughout the implementation process, and his/her first mission is to run through a slide deck that sets expectations in terms of roles and responsibilities, initial reporting capabilities, project scope and timeline, and activities and deliverables through each stage of the process. Basic project management stuff.

[Read more Omniture Implementation 101]

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The end of 2008 was incredibly busy! It’s been a fabulous year, other than the crappy economy and its effects on everyone. It has been a very interesting year in terms of search news, and I have the feeling we’ll see some big changes in 2009. While it’s important to know where you’ve been to give perspective to where you’re going, I’m not going to write a retrospective or make bold predictions - lots of other people have done that already. But I do want to extend every best wish to all my friends, family and colleagues for 2009. May your new year be bright and shining and prosperous!

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I first mentioned the SEO for Firefox plugin in my post about competitive SEO tools. It already did some cool things, but it’s now been updated to include a nifty feature called SEO X-Ray.

Once you have the plugin installed and updated, a right-click on any page (or left-click, if you’re a lefty like me) in Firefox brings up the option to select it. A transparent grey layer shows on top of the selected page, with a darker grey box showing number of internal and external links to the page, plus meta title, description, and keywords. I know it’s not hard to find this info in other places, but having it all in one place is useful. Clicking the number of links brings up Yahoo Site Explorer, showing the pagerank of each page linked from, type of link (text, img, etc.), anchor text, date, and other info. There is a link to the SEObook keyword density analyzer, which I don’t put a lot of stock in for relevance per se, but I use it to find the general direction a competitor is heading with their SEO efforts. There are options to export the list of links (I couldn’t get this to work), and to run a Whois or IP search.

The dark grey info box is easily moved out of the way using click-and-drag, revealing the transparent layer below. This layer highlights all the Header tag elements on the page (H1, H2, etc.). SEO X-Ray isn’t an entire competitive analysis in one stop, but it’s a very convenient place to start.

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…because I’m a big gadget geek. Try it on your iPhone or Blackberry!

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After some deliberation, I’ve moved my catpickett.com blog to a new home. I had one site for consulting stuff and another for the blog, and it didn’t make sense to keep them separate. Luckily I was able to import all the blog posts and comments from the old blog, so if you’ve commented there (Hi Eric Werner!), don’t be surprised to see it over here. As always, questions, comments, and criticism are welcomed.

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After my last post on Why Compete Sucks, I found this SEOmoz post that seems to corroborate it on a larger scale. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of alternatives out there, so I thought I’d outline some other tools that can help provide competitive SEO information. I’ll focus first on free tools, but I will write about paid tools soon — I don’t mind paying a reasonable amount for something that’s accurate.

A few disclaimers:

1. I’m not wild about Quantcast or Alexa, so I’ll leave those alone for now.
2. There’s no substitute for a detailed manual analysis of competing sites, including code review, link and navigation analysis, and inspired bribery (kidding!).
3. These tools are listed in no particular order.

[click to continue…]

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I know it sounds linkbaity, but I couldn’t come up with a title for this post that better reflects my assessment of Compete. On the surface, Compete seems like a good idea — they have a five-year daily clickstream history for 2 million consumers, and 80 million page views per day. Compete’s tagline claims that it “helps you benefit from click-sharing by providing free services that create a more trusted, transparent, and valuable Internet.” However, when digging into the methodologies behind these services, I found Compete to be anything but transparent, and of questionable value. (OK, so it’s a huge improvement over Alexa, but that’s a whole other rant.) [click to continue…]

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One of my favorite quotes is often attributed to Tom Peters: “What gets measured, gets done.” In web analytics, often what gets measured is associated with money — what brings in revenue, and what costs the client cash.

Last fall I had the opportunity to hear Avinash Kaushik speak at Time Warner in NYC, and one of the things he said that really made sense to me was (I’m paraphrasing here), there’s no point in measuring anything that isn’t actionable. There are lots of KPIs that look pretty on paper, but either they don’t have tangible meaning or you can’t do anything to make them go up or down, so they just clutter things up. As a search marketer, I think it is even more essential to focus on the numbers that matter.

Essential metrics vary from site to site — they will be different for an e-commerce site than they will for a financial services site, and even more different for a forum or social media site. For me, these are the Big Three important metrics — the things that matter when measuring success towards my goals: [click to continue…]

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