Just because you can swing a hammer doesn’t mean you should build your own house.

That’s right, we use builders for a reason. Building a house requires knowledge and skill, not to mention time and coordination. To top it off, the State is changing building codes every day to keep you guessing. Ok so maybe every day is bit of an exaggeration and maybe you’re damn good with a structural drawing – but you get my point.

Dear Reader: Note that this is a bit of a rant. As the Director of Business Development I’m always a bit amazed at how agonized some prospects are when deciding whether they should hire an agency or continue to manage SEM on their own.  And so while I get a little worked up about it, hopefully this message resonates enough to be taken to heart. With that said, I contend:

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

If you think about it though, isn’t managing your own Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Campaigns a little like trying to build your own house? Sure, Adwords management is a little cleaner than construction, and you’re not going to live in your Adwords account (or so you think), but you can just as easily end up with a horrible mess and a lot of money up in smoke.

To get right down to it, the problem is accessibility - the same element that’s contributed to Google’s smashing success. It’s so easy to get started with Adwords and see it working that anyone can do it. And before long they’ve convinced you that you’ve got wicked skills. You’re putting up a campaign and your ads are appearing! Upon inspection though, you realize you’ve got all your product keywords in one Ad Group, you’re using Broad Match where Exact should be and the Cost Per Sale is higher than any of your products are worth.

Managing a task that you would have normally thought absurd to take on yourself seems well within your grasp. Would you have thought of producing your own television advertising? But so many organizations have simply tacked SEM Advertising on as another component of an existing job. That was OK when you were spending $2000 per month on Search. But now that you’re spending $20,000 or $200,000 per month, it’s no longer acceptable to treat search campaign management like an afterthought.

So what should you do? The way I see it, you’ve got two choices.

(Read the full article…)

Are you ignoring an engagement opportunity?

The way an organization handles a simple email unsubscribe transaction can leave a lasting impression on the audience. It’s a customer engagement opportunity to increase goodwill - and even make a sale.  Think of it as another marketing channel.

[Note: This post is part of my "Every Touch Point Matters" series. See my previous posts on Optimizing Error Messages and Optimizing the Thank You Page.]

“You don’t love me no more…”

Rejection! One of your email newsletter subscribers decides she wants a cleaner, lighter inbox - and that your newsletter is dead weight. Last year, I was that subscriber.

Looking at my email In box, it appeared every online interaction I’ve had since 1995 came with an annoying little brother of a newsletter that has followed me around ever since, waving his hands and yelling, “Watch me! watch me!” Since a swift kick was out of the question, I’ve dealt with the situation by applying filters (as if putting an email in my “To Read” folder made it any more likely that I’d read it) and by hitting the Delete button. And then one day, a particularly irrelevant email triggered an avalanche of stored-up irritation. After calming down, I resolved then and there to tackle the problem at its source:

I would UNSUBSCRIBE.

I unsubscribed from over twenty email newsletters before I ran out of endurance, patience, and caffeine. As you’ll see in the examples below my experiences varied widely.

Why does this matter to companies?

Why does such a minor interaction, far from the glamor and dazzle of the mighty landing page, even deserve a blog post? Why do email unsubscribes matter to companies? There is a one-word answer to this:

Goodwill.

Whatever your subscriber’s motivation for unsubscribing, how you handle this simple request can affect their perception of your company from that moment on. You can either build goodwill or you can burn it.

And another one-word answer:

Opportunity.

Again, whatever the reason for the unsubscribe, the visitor is now ON YOUR SITE (minimally, they’re on your email subscription platform). That’s an opportunity to engage, communicate, and present your brand in a good light. It could even be an opportunity to change their minds or redirect their interest to a different offering.

So!  Let’s look at some guidelines, and then a few examples.

(Read the full article…)

I’m an introvert by nature, so this whole social media thing has left me feeling like an outsider looking in. While everyone Facebooks and Twitters each other to death, I’m asking “What’s the point?” It’s a genuine item of curiosity to me. I can’t really relate to wanting to relate to everyone. I have a hard enough time keeping up with my real friends who live 15 minutes away.

Don’t believe the hype

But as an advertising professional, I’m also always judging any new trend or platform for its potential to impact the business world. I watched the rise of Facebook and the attendant hype about how the company was going to pioneer a new advertising world with suspicion. And wanted to claw my eyes out when I saw Microsoft shell out $240M for less than a 2% stake in Facebook. That was back when all the headlines said that Facebook was going to be the next Google. Now that the winds of conventional wisdom have shifted, nobody seems to be making that prediction any longer.

Not that I’m a great oracle, but it seemed plain as day to me that a traditional interrupt-driven advertising model was never going to work in an environment where users are focused on connecting with each other in a highly personal way. Yet that’s what Facebook was preparing to launch at the time. Sure enough…

Read the full article at Search Engine Land

Conversion Optimization: We love it.

Unlike PPC where you continuously spend money driving traffic to your site hoping to increase sales/conversions, optimizing a page for conversion is a one-time cost with an ongoing reward (assuming it’s done well): increased conversion rate.

So, of course we love it.

Whenever we can come in and permanently increase a client’s conversion rate for a one-time cost to them, we look like rock stars … and it’s fun.

(Don’t get me wrong. The ideal situation for both us and our clients is a combination of PPC and conversion optimization, but I’m just going to touch on the latter.)

Conversion Optimization?

Just so we’re all on the same page, a conversion is anything you define it to be. A conversion for your web site could be a visitor viewing a specific page, clicking on a certain button, filling out a form, or making a purchase.

Regardless of the actual conversion point, conversion optimization is the processes of making design and/or navigation changes to a web page or pages in order to drive specific user actions.

(Read the full article…)

There you are, a solid 9 months into a relationship with your SEM agency. You’re paying them 15% of what you’re spending with the search engines. Yes, they’re paying for themselves through their gains, but lately, you’re starting to question what they’re doing. There was the initial bump, and then a few months ago, a junior account representative was assigned and the hockey stick ROAS chart you thought you’d be seeing is starting to look more like a hockey rink – flat and cold. In the back of your mind a few questions are racing around… Did I just get placed onto the autopilot list? Do these guys know what they’re talking about? Am I being taken for a ride? Did I just find the end of the Internet?

Well from our experience, you’re not alone. And unfortunately, as this field has grown in popularity, the number of bad practitioners has grown exponentially. And, since the word we’ve chosen is “bad”, let’s dive a little deeper, since there’s some ambiguity.

What does bad look like?

(Read the full article…)

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