Online Advertising For Small Business

After spending 3 inspirational days representing WebVisible at the DMS 2011 conference in Denver (put on by BIA/Kelsey), one thing seems more true than ever: SMB owners have their hands full. They recognize the importance of internet advertising, but often wear multiple hats, juggling sales, marketing, and branding in one hand, and customer service, retention and innovation in the other hand. Outsourcing is often the only viable solution for many of their day-to-day business processes, including lead generation and marketing on the Internet.

As a company founded and known for excellence in supporting reseller and partners with small business advertising solutions, WebVisible manages many of the same processes upstream. Pay Per Click online advertising, lead generation, SaaS driven marketing solutions and Reputation Monitoring are all part of our value proposition. Our goal is always three-fold: deliver easy to use marketing solutions for WebVisible clients via an automated advertising system, provide scalable solutions for our partners, and innovate, innovate, innovate.

I read an article recently about Steve Job’s formula for success at Apple, who lists the following as one of his top mantras for success: “Make it all one platform”. Apple’s commitment to blurring the distinction between software and hardware with respect to providing a singular user experience has driven every-day consumer experiences with mobile devices into the cloud. iPhone is iTunes is Mobile.me (now iCloud). Their customer loyalty is unparalleled, and it’s largely due to their commitment to platform integration and unified user experience.
 

WebVisible recently unveiled a cutting edge Reputation Monitoring product. It stood alone with a separate log-in for a short while, but is now baked into our Merchant Center Dashboard alongside Geneva, KPEye and all of the other behind-the-scenes technology that our customers, partners and resellers benefit from on a daily basis.  

Steve Jobs’ desire to make Apple ‘just one thing’, with no distinction between hardware, software, products and services is largely paralleled with the Reputation Monitoring iFrame integration for two reasons:

1.) Fusing access to our Merchant Center and Reputation Monitoring dashboard effectively turns two activities into one, making it easier for a business owner to keep track of online advertising and reputation. If you’re wondering how or why this is, think about the area code of your cell phone. Area codes are perceived as a single unit of information, not three separate numbers.  Single sign-on access for a dashboard benefits from the same psychological principal.

2.) The second is a bit more of a game-changer, as it leverages the well-known statute of negative word of mouth, and that it travels 10 times faster than positive word-of-mouth, albeit in reverse.  

Delivering world-class results to our advertisers is easy. Helping them to carve time out of their busy schedules to spend time engaging with our Merchant Center to revel in the success of their SEM campaigns is a bit more challenging. If an advertiser invests in a successful advertising platform that delivers dynamite results, if they don’t engage with the platform, they might not recognize the success of the campaign even when we are exceeding their expectations.

Business owners are busy, and they don’t know what they don’t know.

To this end, the real magic in platform integration is that by giving our advertisers the ability to identify and respond to negative (and positive) reviews in a unified dashboard, their retention rates increase.

Why is this?

How do negative reviews relate to lead generation, advertiser retention and platform engagement?

By putting Reputation Monitoring right alongside the ability to track SEM campaigns simultaneously, something remarkable happens. Marketing and Reputation Monitoring merge into the same platform and become synonymous in terms of the mental energy it takes for advertisers to set aside on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Advertisers’ log in to their Merchant Center dashboard more often, and retention increases alongside client satisfaction. 

According to the principle of the speed of word of mouth, the desire to vet out and respond to or eliminate negative reviews online is also far greater than the desire to read positive reviews. Since advertisers are already online and logged in checking their reviews, they naturally check the results of their advertising campaigns since it’s only a click away. Merging these previously separate platforms together drives advertisers to engage more frequently, for longer, and with greater attentiveness. With platform integration, the distinctions between marketing Reputation Monitoring blur into a singular activity, encouraging more frequent and increased platform engagement with our advertisers.

Lead generation services and reputation monitoring tools are now interrelated, interdependent and act as drivers and motivators for one another. The power of harnessing innovation via platform integration is gestalt-esque, resulting in a downstream increase in both perceived and objective value in the eyes of advertisers, and an upstream lift in retention rates for resellers.

1 + 1 now equals 3.

Apple isn’t Apple because of it’s product mix alone.

Apple is Apple because of it’s unified user experience.

When it comes to the complexity of Internet advertising for small businesses, platform integration is as crucial as ever for today's SMB.

If I was a betting man, I ‘d say that Steve Jobs would be proud of us :)

Eric Rosen
Manager of Business Development
WebVisible

To learn more about why online advertising agencies worldwide make WebVisible as their Interactive Advertising Software Platform of choice, click here.

Some business owners skeptical if the long-term payoffs are worth the cost

You’ve seen the emails and heard the radio ads. Internet-based “daily deal” coupons are becoming a large part of the online advertising industry. But are such offers worth the cost for an auto repair shop or other small to medium-sized business? Some say no, while other business owners report they are gaining new customers–and profits–from the venture.

A June 2011 survey of small businesses by MerchantCircle finds that the leading reason companies like daily deals is customer acquisition (58%). At the same time, the top reason for not offering a daily deal again (42.4%) was their failure to attract new customers. Hmmm, perhaps more data will help answer our question.

Two surveys back up the belief that daily deals attract new customers. The first, a survey conducted by Utpal M. Dholakia at Rice University, found that new customers made up more than 77% of deal buyers. All of them spent over the value of the deal offer and, on average, about 20% became repeat customers. The second study, done by ConsumerSearch.com and The About Group, discovered that an overwhelming majority of those who had used a daily deal returned– even without another discount. Fifty-three percent of redeemers went on to become regular customers.

Businesses who were skeptical about the value of daily deals expressed concern about giving discounts to consumers who would have patronized the establishment anyway. According to a ForeSee Results survey, there is some basis for this concern. The largest share of daily deal users – thirty-eight percent—said they were already loyal to the business offering a deal. However, nearly a third of those taking advantage of a daily deal special were new customers, and the same percentage were customers who had either visited only occasionally or had stopped patronizing the establishment altogether.

So what’s the answer? Are daily deals worth it? Looks like the jury is still out. But one thing is certain. As this graphic demonstrates, an on-going search engine advertising campaign will put in front of people who are ready to buy, when they’re ready to buy – not when your “daily deal” happens to hit their email box. This is especially important in the auto industry, where people who need services or products typically need them right now.

WebVisible has more than 10 years of experience helping local businesses establish an effective online marketing presence through fully-managed online search advertising programs that generate predictable results. Contact WebVisible today for more information on how search advertising can help grow your auto-related business.

According to a recent Affinity Express survey of small to medium businesses (SMB), it appears the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often overlooked. As shown in the following chart from the survey, 77% of SMBs are using websites and landing pages to market their businesses, but only 31% are using SEO to assure customers will easily find them online.

There are probably many reasons as to why the use of SEO is rather low in comparison to website and landing page usage (ie. limited resources, lack of knowledge, or perhaps businesses feel their products or services will speak for themselves). Whatever the reasons, SMBs need to realize that in today’s market, SEO is an integral part of any online marketing effort. It is not an option, it is a necessity.  Since most consumers today are searching online to find potential products and services available, a business must optimize the chances of their website being found on major search engines by using SEO.

SEO can be challenging for any business, especially smaller ones with limited resources since keeping up with the competition, popular search terms, and the ever-changing algorithms search engines like Google and Bing use is a continuous process. To meet this challenge, many businesses find out-sourcing this task more efficient. WebVisible is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company and leading name in local online advertising, known for being a true expert in bringing the Internet as an advertising and customer acquisition medium to small businesses around the world. WebVisible’s award winning Geneva software platform (named 2008 Internet Product of the Year by the American Electronics Association) contains a powerful optimizer – a rules-based campaign management algorithm that continuously learns and improves the placement and results of our clients’ advertisements. With over ten years of experience, WebVisible offers proven SEO results.

To learn more about how WebVisible can provide SEO solutions and other Internet marketing services, please feel free to contact us.

During a typical week, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) devote their time to delivering products and services, balancing checkbooks and growing customer relationships. At the end of the week, finding time to focus on online advertisement can be a challenge. A successful campaign isn’t determined solely on the initial set-up; the subsequent monitoring and fine-tuning process is just as important. A good advertisement campaign begins with relative content and continues with ensuring ad copy is compelling, keywords are attracting leads and traffic is being directed to the right audience. The amount of work put in to managing an advertisement campaign takes many hours, not minutes, a week. For SMBs those are hours that could be better spent running your business. Staying abreast of your field is difficult enough, without the added job of making sure your business is visible to customers.

At WebVisible, your advertising campaign will be carefully monitored and adjusted to meet the unique needs of your business. While our experts run your campaign, SMBs can view how their campaign is performing at any time. SMBs can track the progress of their campaign through Merchant Center, where every click, call and connection received is documented. With the Geneva Technology Platform, our team is able to track:

1)      Which Ads are Performing and Which Ads Aren’t Receiving Clicks

2)      Which Keywords Are Getting Leads

3)      Which Keyword and Ad Combinations Achieve Conversions

With this information, SMBs are able to see what products and services are in demand and can determine which direction the business should be focused on. One of the many benefits of a Software as a Service company is that we take the work off your hands, leaving you with more time for your business and customer relationships. While relevant advertising campaigns are important for SMBs, developing customer relationships is also important for establishing credibility and trust. At WebVisible, we fine tune advertising campaigns so SMBs can focus on what they do best: growing businesses and building customer relationships.

- Contributed by WebVisible's Meldoy Gandy

With a lot of changes taking place in the online advertising industry and most notably - at WebVisible, we’re excited hear CEO Ron Burr in a candid interview this afternoon with Will Crist on www.octalkradio.net streaming at 5pm Pacific time. Ron will discuss our expansion into the Asian marketplace, improvements to our interactive advertising platform, new products for small business marketing, and more.

You can find the show on iTunes as a business podcast by typing Pilgrim on the 405 in the iTunes podcast search box, after the initial airing of the show.

Pilgrim Talks is one of the innovative talk show on OC Talk Radio, Orange County's premier business station. The goal of the show is to interview CEOs and Presidents of thriving Orange County companies to hear how they are making it through this new economy.

To learn more about Will Crist and the Pilgrim on the 405 visit www.pilgrimonthe405.com

• Impressisons: Typically, search ads are measured by “impressions”, which is the number times your ad is displayed to searchers.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of viewers who click on your ad to learn more.
• Conversion rate: Arguably the most important metric of all is conversion rate, or lead rate, which is the percentage of people who clicked on your ad and then took the next step to contact you or provide their contact information because they have a need for your service.  Those are the people you’re trying to capture with search advertising.

It is also important to remember that the quality of long tail keywords is just as important as quantity. For example, 50 poorly-selected search phrases can be ineffective and result in zero leads, while 35 clear, specific search phrases may deliver an abundance of leads. 

Unfortunately, there is no formula for choosing effective long tail keywords. Often times the difference between effective and ineffective long tail keywords is the result of years of research defined by market variables, advertiser budget, business category and geo-targeted region. Unless advertisers had the benefit of advertising experts on their team, it can prove difficult to ensure that the long tail keywords they are choosing are truly effective.


Negative Keywords: Avoiding the Wrong Audience

Negative keywords are terms that represent business you do not want to attract, and therefore are used to prevent ads from being shown. For example, an attorney might want to attract clients that search for "Chapter 7 Bankruptcy" or "Chapter 11 Bankruptcy", while legal services related to family law, such as "child custody” and "divorce" take too much time and are not as profitable.  Defining the latter terms as negative keywords prevents the attorney’s ads from being displayed when someone searches for "child custody" or "divorce". Just like long tail keywords, negative keywords can significantly improve campaign performance by reducing the number of clicks by poor quality leads, which reserves your ad budget for higher quality leads.

WebVisible also found that the number of negative keywords used in a campaign also had a strong affect on campaign performance. Our study’s results show that the campaigns with the highest number of leads per campaign dollar had between 1 to 5 negative keywords in addition to the right number of positive long tail keywords.

When looking at the same campaigns with monthly budgets of $1,000, those between 1-5 negative keywords also generate an average of 10 more leads per month than campaigns with 0 negative keywords. The data indicates that using negative keywords sparingly can improve performance, but using too many negative keywords can restrict lead flow unnecessarily and degrade campaign performance.

It is important to look carefully at the keywords you are utilizing in your campaign, and ensure that you are not only selecting long tail positive keywords, but that you are eliminating advertisement in areas of your business that are not profitable.

Dangerous Keywords Ahead

Typical analytics programs used on search engines such as Google can tell advertisers which keywords are popular to searchers, and receive a high number of clicks. However, clicks do not always represent the full story. To really understand which keywords are most effective for a campaign, advertisers must look at conversions – the phone calls, form fills, emails or text messages that are generated from your online ad.

Dangerous keywords are those that are highly clicked, yet still show a low conversion rate when you look across an entire transaction process. Often times, due to the popularity and demand for these keywords, advertisers will pay top dollar for these dangerous keywords, with little or no knowledge of the actual conversion history. Advertisers run the risk of spending a majority of their budget on these kinds of keywords, and receive little or no return for their dollars.

How do you find out what these dangerous keywords are? Unfortunately, the only way to identify dangerous keywords is to analyze historical conversion data. Advertisers would need to extensively research their keyword conversions over time, and compare results to thousands of other campaigns across major search engines over time.  This requires not only the analytics technology, but also massive amounts of conversion data, which is not readily available even to search engine companies, much less small business owners.  

With more than 100,000 online campaigns under our belt, and data from nine years of managing search ads for our clients, WebVisible has developed KPEye, a keyword performance engine that analyzes years of historical data as well as real-time market data, to help our clients optimize their advertising budgets.  With KPEye, WebVisible Account Managers can build high performing keyword lists for many types of businesses, free of any dangerous keywords, and optimized with negative and long tail keywords that drive the right traffic to your door.

Summary
Optimizing keywords is a very time-consuming exercise that requires massive amounts of search history, conversion data, analysis, testing and refinement. If search analytics isn’t one of your hobbies, consider using a service to manage your online advertising campaign.  You might see a considerable increase in ROI by taking advantage of experienced Account Managers, Creative Managers, and Performance Managers who regularly monitor your campaign results and fine-tune your keywords to deliver targeted impressions, high CTRs, and most importantly, the highest number of leads for your campaign dollar.

• The percentage of phone calls increased by 56% when compared to last year. WebVisible's advertisers had 6.1% of their clicks resulting in phone calls in Q4 of 2010, compared to 3.9% in Q4 2009.

• Video viewing has increased rapidly in the last year, showing an 85% increased when looking at year-over-year metrics.
• The number of advertisers with video on their landing pages has also increased, up 19% from a year ago.

• In October 2010, Yahoo search advertising migrated to Bing's adCenter platform. Spending shifted away from Google in order to captalize on the slow migration of other small business advertising to the Yahoo-Bing search alliance. 
• Google's share of spending dropped to less than 38% of total spending in November, verses 56% in Q4 2009, but had recovered to 52% by December 2010.

• The average small business search advertiser spent $2,126 with WebVisible in Q4 2010, a slight decrease of 1.1% from Q4 2009.

• Keyword counts increased by 30% from Q4 2009 to an average of 87 root keywords per advertiser in Q4 2010.

• The increase in keywords combined with flat spending levels suggest that small business owners who want to create successful campaigns should consider a third party, as increased expertise and enhanced software algorithms that actively manage and maintain keyword portfolios can give the most optimal results.

Blogging live from Interactive Local Media 2010 in Santa Clara, CA, Carla Fitzgerald, WebVisible's VP of Marketing gives an update:

Topics today addressed a variety of local content channels:  Local News, Local Radio, Local Search, Local Deal-of-the-Day offers.  With so many options to reach consumers, advertisers have tough decisions to make about where they should invest and what will deliver the best ROI.   Along these lines, the partner from Google Ventures (investment arm of Google) said there is a huge opportunity for companies that provide analytics to small business that helps them to understand which customer acquisition and retention programs work.   SMB’s need “visibility and actionable information” to manage their online investments because it’s overwhelming.  I was happy to hear that since “visibility and actionable information” is exactly what WebVisible is offering with our Merchant Center application for advertisers. 

There was a lot of talk about the fact that “local” is not a static, geographic radius from a business or service area.  What the consumer sees as “local” depends on what they are looking for:  if it’s a regular purchase, like dry cleaning, then local needs to be convenient to work or home;  if the need is for a special event like a concert or show, then “local” can be a lot further away and the price or offer really matters, and if it’s for a critical service like tooth replacement, then the location and price are only part of the decision – the credentials and reviews are just as important.  Again, this multi-dimensional view of “local” is something our founder, Kirsten Mangers, has been talking about for years.  (WebVisible is validated once again!)

The hot topics of Social and Mobile get “merged” when discussing “mobile location check in” services like Gowalla and Foursquare.  (Google Ventures said they’re looking at 35 different companies that offer this type of technology!)  These solutions can help advertisers with brand awareness, reputation management, generating more foot traffic, loyalty programs, and promoting onsite deals.  These are not specific to small business, but definitely focused on driving local business, and in some cases, driving loyalty to big brands.  What’s the SMB message?  Most importantly, understand what your customers care about and how they like to engage you.  If you’re a local bar targeting hip young adults, then location check-in may be just the right thing for you, but if you’re an attorney, probably not… unless you’re trying to stir up a class action of some kind!

There is an explosion of digital marketing technologies and services being developed, and even the experts at this conference are not sure which approaches will pay off for advertisers in the long term.  Regardless of the sexy new technologies available, the message was still clear that small business still needs simpler, measureable ways to promote themselves today.  We couldn’t agree more!