Negative Embedded Match is awesome.  Unfortunately a lot of people don’t know about it or use it.  

When talking to people in Search Marketing, there are two AdWords features, that I find many folks unaware of.  A shame becuase they’re really important.  These are definitely negative embedded match, and the impression share report (more on impression share in a future post).  

Anyways, negative embedded match is simple to use and even simplier to understand why and where you should use it.  Basically, negative embedded match lets you show ads for every variation of a keyword, except the keyword itself.  

Let’s look at a quick example:  Say I’m advertising on the term “Apartments in New York City”, broad match.  After a couple days of advertising, I review my search queries and find that “Apartments in New York City” is matching to “Apartments in New York”.  I definitely don’t want this traffic, as it’s not likely to convert (too broad/irrelevant). Problem is, I can’t just add “New York” as a negative, because that will kill all good “Apartments in New York City” traffic as well.

The solution, negative embedded match:

-[Apartments In New York]

Now, we’ll display for “Apartments in New York City” and all other variations that may have good ROI, and we won’t display for the overly broad “Apartments in New York” search query.

Negative embedded match is great because it can be utilized in so many different scenarios, where you want to prevent a certain keyword, but you don’t want to kill off all the other good long tail variations.  

Hope you can use negative embedded match to your AdWords advantage.  Next up in “The More You Know About AdWords” series will be “Impression Share Reports” !!  Woo, stay tuned!

//

Apparently, they’ve locked down the domain name already.  So far, we say it’s no bing deal, until Microsoft proves us wrong.  Here’s why: 

They Need Way More Than a Rename to Takeover Search: They need a search engine that actually ’searches’ well, and last I checked, Live Search doesn’t work all that well, even after all these years.  I can’t tell you how many times it still returns horrible results for my queries.  

People like using products that work well, and Live doesn’t work super well yet.  A rename won’t change this. 

Microsoft brand association may be hard to shed: Word on the street is, there will be a huge ad blitz, something like $100million in ad buys used for advertising the new - Bing ? - search engine.  Is this because they’re trying to lose the Microsoft association?  I speculate that part of this is the reason for the rename, but I’m not sure they’ll be able to keep consumers from making the association.  Microsoft is software and an OS to billions of people, not a search engine.  

The name’s no good:  Bing? Bing???! Come on guys.  Just kidding.  Guess ‘Blastmodo’ was already taken

They’re definitely more eye-catching and draw more attention to the sponsored, AdWords section of the SERPs.  

I wonder if we’ll see these favicon website icons become standard in AdWords ads?  More importantly, what impact will these have on click through rate, or even better, Google’s bottom line ($$$)?

Interesting stuff!  Stay Tuned.//

Still, it’s refreshing to see Google’s own Hal Varian clearly explain the way the AdWords auction works. This is a great vid for people new to search advertising, and for veterans who need to re-remember that this is one giant, pretty basic, auction platform.

Definitely check the video out below or view the full post on the Inside AdWords blog here.

“Among the audience of 63.2 million people who accessed news and information on their mobile devices in January 2009, 22.4 million (35 percent) did so daily; more than double the size of the audience last year.”

This is exciting stuff not just becuase internet use on mobile devices keeps growing, or becuase more and more people are using the internet ‘daily’ on their mobile phones.  It’s exciting because the perfect presentation model and perfect advertising models for mobile web use and mobile search haven’t shown their faces yet.  

it will certainly be exciting to keep an eye on mobile and continue to think about it as a new, potentially extremely powerful medium for all advertisers, including search marketers. 

1). Long tail = low volume. It’s true, long tail keywords are more specific, more likely to convert, and more overlooked by your competitors. In other words, they’re also LESS likely to be searched by potential customers. Sure, you can input them in broad match, and they’ll match to many other search queries, solving your volume issue. But this also defeats the purpose, as they’ll match to irrelevant terms or broader head keywords.

2). Long tails often aren’t allowed by Google. Have you ever noticed, after poking through your ad groups, that many of your long tail keywords aren’t even displaying. AdWords will display a message like “ad not displaying…limited or no search volume”. This means that, although you have great long-tails, they’re not even active, thus pointless.
Maybe it’s because Google would rather force us to bid on more expensive head terms. Maybe it’s because they don’t want to waste server space dealing with and managing low volume keywords. Whatever the reason, this is more proof that long tail keywords aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be. They can - and do - deliver amazing ROI and are an important component of search campaigns. That being said, they’re not necessarily ‘the answer’ when it comes to effective PPC advertising, as they have their limitations.

Although i’m no email marketer, I do recieve “email marketing” in my personal email accounts, so i know what I think is effective and what probably is not.  Here’s a message to email marketers, a few things I think you should consider before sending your next email marketing message.  Here are two things (so far) that you should think about if you want your email marketing to be effective.  More to come as I learn more about email marketing!:

1). Stop Sending me a huge image email which I’ll have to ‘Download’ to view.  Send text, and keep it brief and engaging.

2). Make it relevant to the reciever!  Don’t you have data about me if I’m already a frequent shopper at your store?  Then why are you telling me about a sale on dresses when you should know damn well I’m a young man who buys dress shirts from you??! Mine your data (if time and budget allow) to deliver effective email marketing messages, messages that are relevant to your customers and potential customers.  (Clothing store Barneys is doing this very effectively right now).

That’s all I’ve got right now.  More to come on this topic I’m sure. Stay tuned.//

First things first, there are a lot of different careers and jobs in search marketing.  You could work for an agency, or you could work in-house.  You might manage pay per click advertising campaigns, or you might engage in seo / search engine optimization.  You might do sales, selling the services, or you might actually be in the trenches.  Since I’ve spent much of my search marketing career in the trenches, managing paid search campaigns, I’ll let you know a little bit about that.

First things first, a search marketing job is similar to many other jobs you may be more familiar with, like writing jobs, analyst jobs, sales jobs, etc.

Lets start with Pay per click manager or analyst, a common breed of mid level search job.  A pay per click campaign analyst or manager will be dealing with keywords, which you’ll bid on.  When these keywords are searched, your sponsored ads may display in the search engines.  You’ll probably be the guy who bids on the keywords, produces the keyword lists or taxonomy, writes the ad copies, and manages the whole shebang.  Or you might just handle one component of all of this.  It depends.  

Either way, you’ll probably be dealing with and analyzing data.  You’ll probably use excel. Math. Your brain.   You’ll be dealing with words and semantics.  You’ll possibly be writing creative and testing different versions.  Finally, you’ll interpret - or attempt to interpret - data which will inform future ‘optimizations’ to a campaign.  

It’s a lot of work depending on where you work and who your clients are.  Surprisingly though, it’s very gratifying stuff if you’re delivering results to your clients.  Possibly best of all, there appears to be a lot of opportunity in this industry, espicially relative to other stagnant or generally hurting industries.  

Interested in understanding the basics of pay per click?  Read my pay per click for beginners post.

If you’re getting into SEO, another type of search marketing job where you attempt to help websites rank organically, it’s a whole ‘nother story.  With seo, you’ll make changes to a websites structure, produce content for the website, and gain links, all in an attempt to draw free attention/clicks to a website.  

If you’re getting into SEO, you should enjoy writing, as you’ll probably be producing content which is keyword rich and also relevant.  You should also enjoy research, as researching keywords before choosing the words and phrases you’ll attempt to ’seo’, will be another big component of the job.

Finally, you should ‘enjoy the web’.  You’ll need to generate links to be successful in seo.  This means you’ll need to produce content people love so much they’ll link to it from their own web site.  By understanding the web and what works on the web to produce buzz or garner attention, you can be successful in SEO.

Interested in an SEO job?  Then you probably shouldn’t read my post claiming traditional SEO is headed for extinction — it’s probably not true anyways, so don’t worry.

There you have it, a brief intro to your common search marketing job and what it’s like.  If you’re interested in getting a job in search marketing, visit some sites and start learning the basics.  Take a look around this site, then head over to a few of the great blogs and industry sites like searchengineland.com, searchenginewatch.com, seomoz.org … the list goes on and on.

Good luck!  Espicially if you end up with a search marketing job.  Search marketing jobs ain’t easy, but they’re not too bad either!!

Happy Holidays!  (I wonder how this is impacting CTR’s?!) 

Here’s why/how:

First of all, Google holds the keys to the SEO castle.  With every algorithym change or tweak, they’re taking more and more emphasis off of traditional organic results and showing users more “sponsored search” paid results.  This is in Googles best interest, and I can’t blame them - yet.  They’re out to strike a balance of delivering relevant results and making big bucks.  They’re doing a great job of both, but I’m quite sure they want more of the “big bucks” part.  

This means Google owns you.  You want to try to play SEO master and rank #1?  You don’t want to pay to play, like the PPC advertisers?  Fine, says Google, we might switchup the algo and you’ll disappear next week.  It happens, and it’s going to be happening more and more as informational sites (the Wikipedias of the world) continue to get more favoring organically.  Sites out to make money, aka businesses, will have to pay to play (with AdWords).  Think of it like a phone book.  The white pages are the organic free listings.  The yellow pages are the sponsored results.  You gotta pay to play if your a business.  But your informational listing can show up for free somewhere. 

Also, it’s getting near impossible to rank for important terms.  Even if your a local business in a relatively small town, its tough to show up near the top of the first page as an organic result. The Google OneBox with the map, and the PPC results have nearly everything covered above the fold.  I just searched “dentist in Costa Mesa”, and barely one organic result shows up on the first page, above the fold.  It’s all PPC and the Google Onebox.  If I was a dentist in Costa Mesa, I’d put very little into SEO. I’d carefully run PPC, track everything to a T, and ensure that I was in the OneBox, among a few other things. 

Bottom line is, SEO keeps losing valuable first-page real estate. 

What this means is, the organic #1result is not #1 anymore.  With the Google Onebox results, the local map, the occasional youtube video results, or Google Shopping results, the normal organic results are often times barely visible!  They keep getting pushed further down the page into no-mans land.  No mans land isn’t a good place to be. 

Add to all of this the fact that the search results vary based on geographical location and even your personal preferences, and we have no baseline.  #1 organic rank here isn’t #1 organic rank for my buddy in the other county. 

When you add it all up, traditional SEO looks like it’s headed for eventual extinction.  I know, I know, another “SEO is dead” themed blog post.  I don’t want it to be that way. I like SEO, SEO’s and everything they (the white hat ones) stand for.  I hope I’m proven wrong!

PS: I know traditional SEO isn’t dead or extinct.  I know it’s still driving billions of dollars of business for a lot of companies, large and small.  Sometimes I just wonder where it’s headed.