WebVisible Blog

 Yahoo! Finance recently posted an article titled "WebVisible Relocates Headquarters to Los Angeles' Electronic Arts Campus, Embracing Collaborative Vibe of Westside Entertainment Complex." Quoted was our CEO Ron Burr, commenting on our new surroundings at the EA Games building and mentioning that we are a team of employees that "work hard together and...play hard together." From my 5 years of experience at WebVisible, Inc. this is one of the main perks that has always stood out. Being part of a company usually entails a professional, and for lack of a better way to say it, staunch, corporate environment where employees are seen more as numbers, instead of names. Although WebVisible, Inc. maintains a high level of professionalism, which is shown through our award-winning interactive advertising software platform and our proven ability to help small companies generate more business, we always set aside time to "play."

There is an unchallenged open-door policy where an employee can approach any member of our executive team, including the CEO, and strike a conversation. The executive team knows each of us personally and always takes the time to say “hi” and ask how we are doing. Employees at a larger corporation might never even see most of the executive team, let alone speak with them on a daily/weekly basis.

Our HR and Marketing departments are always looking for ways to make work more fun by including all employees in company events and games which helps us to get to know one another and also provides a low stress, positive working environment. Although this is the case at a lot of other companies, every employee in these two departments knows each person in the company by name which gives the feeling that you are being invited to an event by a close friend, instead of being put on a list simply because you are an employee.

WebVisible's Bowling Extravaganza, 2011

 As I mentioned earlier, I hit my 5-year mark in April of this year and am proud to belong to such a strong company that actually takes pride in each and every one of its employees.

Many people are confused about what negative keywords are— or how they work.  Negative keywords are simply a way to more effectively manage unwanted traffic in your campaign. With 90% of people online using search engines, there is certainly a push (and necessity) to refine search terms and weed out internet users that do not relate to the services or products you wish to provide or sell.

Let’s say you own a carpet cleaning business that specializes in steam cleaning services for carpet and upholstery.  The types of people you don’t want to attract are people looking to rent machines or buy supplies for their own steam cleaning machines. Adding words with a hyphen (minus sign) at the front creates a negative keyword. For your particular campaign, you might see these negative keywords:

-rental
-supplies

By adding these negative keywords, your ads won’t show when people search for those specific terms.  Therefore, if a customer was to type “steam machine rental”, then your ad would not appear because it contains the term “rental”. The same would apply if the word “supplies” was included in the search term phrase (eg. “steam machine supplies”).

Adding negative keywords to your campaign can have positive and beneficial effects—improving your chances of reducing cost per click and increasing return on investment. By filtering search terms in your favor, negative keywords help you gain more quality leads and decrease time and money wasted on unwanted traffic.

When choosing negative keywords, it is imperative to only use terms that do not apply to your services.  Otherwise, you could potentially harm your campaign’s performance by hindering relevant customers from finding you online.  Therefore, it is essential to the success of your campaign that both the keywords and the negative keywords are chosen carefully to represent your business and service.

*According to http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Generations-Online-in-2009.aspx

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

When trying to figure out what keywords to use, it’s easy right?  Create a list of words that are common-sense ways people find a bankruptcy or family attorney. 

Wrong! 

We’re often struggle with understanding and deciphering market segments on such a social science and behavioral level. It’s far more difficult than a list of the most common thought of 30 or 100 words that apply to an entire industry or business line. 

Segments = Tiers = Query patterns = The way people search

Those with a marketing background know that a segment means audience, and by audience we have to understand need.  To understand need, we have to understand intent (yes, argh, again) and by intent we have to understand behaviors behind intent.

Keywords often are created from semantic research, competitor analysis and using great real-time search tools such as Google Insights and Trends, the Wonder Wheel and many other plug-ins that display segment behaviors; or, keyword queries.  Performing keyword research dynamically is mission critical to keep up with the market and segments of today, not six or even four months ago.  Keywords are constantly updated as technology in search itself evolves, the markets change, behaviors change, searches change and queries change.

They’re also researched simply by understanding the boundaries and limitations of differing market segments. 

How someone types in a query defines their market segmentation.  For example, type “Sedona hotel specials weekend,” and I should be taken to results with numerous listings of hotels, discounts, weekend getaway packages or even a sign-up for daily deals for upcoming weekend package specials.  The landing page should be a specific representation of my query, showing me the myriad of hotel choices or one choice: to book in advance or sign-up for more info.

Now, if I searched “Sedona hotel specials this weekend,” I better get results for specials to get ‘outta dodge this weekend, book now, % off, discounts galore, free breakfasts, upgrades, you name it!  Not general information or a sign-up form, I want to be taken to results and the place to buy the 4-star resort near the red rocks with a convincing tagline to make me book it in seconds.  If not, I’m searching again. 

So, what’s the difference?  A LOT.  It’s a totally different segment of the market by four little letters: “this.”  I’m now further down the funnel.

Different audiences, different needs, different intent and different behavior behind my intent.  In the second search, I wanted deals to get away right now.  I’m further down the funnel and ready to buy.  Huge difference in search, and huge difference in need, intent and audience.  A four letter word makes all the difference in my readiness to plop in my credit card because I’m a different segment than without using the word “this.”

Sounds simple right?  Hardly.  Imagine how many different keyword segments are out there for a bankruptcy attorney who specializes in Chapter 7 and 13, but not 11.  Go ahead, take yourself down that pigeonhole and see how far you go by changing one word in the search query: ‘Chapter 7 debt relief’ or ‘Chapter 7 debt relief help.’  Just four letters and you change the landscape.  Help speaks to a different segment, audience, need and intent.  Help signals “I’m in trouble and I need it—now!”

Unfortunately, there are more than one or two rules for the keywords which are relevant (which should show your ads), and which are not (which are negatives, and help us avoid the wrong audiences).  What’s relevant to one large Law Firm specializing in all aspects of Family, Child, Paternity and Divorce Law may be irrelevant to a small niche lawyer focusing only on Divorce Law.  Knowing all of the various business market lines, and their variations, allow for keyword segmentation to create tiers, or markets.  These boundaries make for extremely easier-than-harder deciphering of where to draw the line when researching potential keywords by market segments. 

Translation: To perform the best, you need to know the goal, the intent, and the market by every little detail about your business. You need to know who will be looking for you, in what way, and by their market segment or tier = the way people find them.

It’s all about keyword qualification, and by qualification it means segment.  If we understand how different keywords naturally will have different levels of qualification (different segments/markets/tiers), keyword research is incredibly more effective, successful and provides you with proper ROI.  No two keywords are the same, every single phrase and every single query in that phrase speaks to a potentially different audience, different revenue stream and different market segment. 

How would you search for a hotel weekend getaway?  Every search and query variation puts you in a different bucket—try it!

• 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.

What is an auto parts SMB’s intent?  Service.

What is Facebook’s latest intent?  Data.

What is a searcher’s intent? Value.  

What is a search engine’s intent?  Relevance.

What is an advertiser’s intent?  Leads. 

What is WebVisible’s intent?  Service with data, value and relevant leads.

The auto parts shop or dentist SMB has to be found everywhichwaypossible when someone needs their service, and especially when they need it right now.  Today more importantly, normal search efforts are simply not enough.  Google, Microhoo, Ask, Search Partners, Partner Search, Sponsored Search, Searching Sponsors—not enough anymore.  You’ve heard that we are diversifying media efforts, but what does social have to do with diversifying SMB advertising? 

Something, and everything.    

The social medium for helping SMB customers find credibility and value is all about now.  Not last week, not next week, right now.  Knowing behaviors is the key to search, but the dynamics of social are a new lock for us.  It’s a crossing of behaviors, intent and mediums which have become mainstream overnight.  Isn’t intent in social different than organic or paid search?  Isn’t search conducted different?  You betcha.

While flighting Knitwit feeds and Spacebook posts now a standard in organic indexing, the landscape has indeed changed to exposing easier findability to relevant searchers.  To open the full potential for SMB’s to take advantage of every step in the funnel, such as branding, awareness, finding, research, appraising, deepening, deciding, rating, evaluating, converting… whew… diversity into the social medium is now a small, but necessary evil as part of SEM efforts. 

We do indeed live in the most exciting time of search marketing, internet advertising and the digital ecosystem.  Diversity is crucial, but balance and understanding every intent is critical.  Social is just a small tiny piece of a larger solution to allow SMB’s to be found anywhere, today.

How do you capture every consumer who needs your services? 

Did you know which browser used will vary search behaviors?

According to IAB, 2010 grew 15% from 2009 and saw $26 billion in all of online ad spends, a record high according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.  Search, video and display make up pieces of the puzzle, yet search covets the lion’s share at 46%.  Display has doubled in size just last year alone, growing from 12 to 24% of the online space.  According to BIA/Kelsey, the numbers are similar.  What’s more exciting is their extremely bright and shining forecast for local search spend to reach $42 billion by 2015!

$42 b i l l i o n.  That’s a lot of keywords and research! 

How much theory of actual user intent is driven by the keywords used to buy into this billion dollar market?  That’s right, all of it.  Search, display, video, all channels and publisher sites are all driven by keywords.  If you don’t know your customers, you don’t know your keywords. 

We need to understand all theories of intention and everything about these users to understand their search intent.  Without consumer-minded thinking, generic keyword research buys into the billion dollar market and contributes to its growth, but how will it contribute to your growth?  Generic keywords are almost completely an in-vain effort, simply hoping the generic market bait will get a big market fish.  You need to place the right bait for the right market for your big fish in the sea of $42 billion.  

User intent comes into play from campaign inception, choosing the right keywords are the most pivotal piece of the puzzle.  The prime real estate of a campaign is not necessarily the ad position or what color the call-to-action button is; it’s the intended audience and their search behaviors.  Right, keywords.  Get the most relative and intended user to your ad and subsequently to the conversion source itself, and your conversion rates should be above the market average, if not better.  Without the right keywords, or without understanding the market, consumers, and their human behaviors online in that market, the ad doesn’t matter, and neither does that page.  Even with the largest of budgets, the best service and support, and the best of technologies (ahem: Geneva), performance will suffer due to incorrect behavioral targeting of audience intent.

Without understanding all of the funnel components of a user’s intent, we can’t gauge which keywords to reach the audience we’re going after.  You may have heard of the word “buyer cycle” or “search funnel.”  Every step of the funnel screams the answer to the user’s “intent:” 

The first stage, awareness, can also be called branding.  It’s usually based on a root keyword, or the one token in a search.  Think, “attorney.”

The second stage, research, can also be called middle stage.  It’s the torso keywords, short tails, not quite ready to buy, and needs to do some research on what the consumer’s true intent is… They may convert, but perhaps not.  These are keywords that have been appended on the initial root keywords.  Think, “bankruptcy attorney.”

The third stage, buying, can also be called end stage.  This truly is the marketplace for conversions.  Sometimes it takes a minute, 2 days, or 3-6 seconds to convert.  The intent with lead generation is to convert all visitors, and you truly only have 3-6 seconds to do it.  That’s all you get.  You want every visitor, every buyer, to buy.

Depending on the keywords used, you’re going to reach a different audience with different stage intentions.  The only way to truly capture a cub’s share of the lion’s share is to understand your customers, the market itself, and keywords.

Ask yourself—what keywords do I use?  How many times do I alter and append my search?

Do you spin down the funnel as your search goes further to find what you’re looking for?  Try it, let us know what keywords “converted” you.  

• 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.