As I’m sure many of you already know, Google made a much-appreciated change to their Keyword Tool last week. Now, Google’s keyword tool provides actual search volume numbers, as opposed to the green bars you’ve seen in the past that represented low, average or high search volume.

One of our first questions upon hearing this news, was whether the search volume reported out by Google was based on the exact keyword or based on the volume for the keyword plus all of its Phrase and Broad Match iterations.

As it turns out, the tool allows you to pull search volume for all 3 of Google’s match types. For example, we entered ‘kids cell phones’ into the tool and searched it 3 separate times, each time changing the pull-down for match types. The data Google provided:

What a great feature! 

Also important to note, is that the stats reported are based on the number of searches performed in Google and the Google Search Network only. Therefore, the 4,400 approximate searches you see above for the exact keyword ‘kids cell phones’ does not include the number of searches performed in other engines such as Yahoo or MSN.

The ability to pull search volume by match type is a unique feature that makes a very helpful addition to Google’s already-robust suite of tools for search engine marketers!

Universal Search has created quite the stir in the SEO community throughout 2007. Many companies that had enjoyed living on Page 1 of Google for quite some time began seeing their precious high rankings slip down or entirely off the page as videos, images, blog posts, news stories and the like began to take over significant parcels of organic real estate.

In this continuing quest for the ideal search results layout, it seems Google is once again experimenting with its blended results - though for once, organic listings are not taking the hit…

This time around the latest blended search tweaking and testing actually has an effect on the PPC community. Over the past month, Google Product results have randomly appeared in the right hand column where PPC Sponsored Listings normally reside. Some examples:

The impact if Google should decide to keep their Product listings in this right hand column position?

• Fewer PPC ads making it onto Page 1, as they are pushed farther down to make room for Product results
• Even lower click-through rates for the right hand PPC ads
• More fight for PPC positions 1-3 above the organic results
• Potential bid inflation due to the increased demand for less PPC real estate

So for all paid search managers out there who have secretly snickered a bit over the mad SEO scramble this year, I suppose we had better sit up and start taking note! In fact, while I have only caught the occasional Product results sneaking in there, Google Blogoscoped and ValleyWag have reported instances of video even showing up in prime PPC real estate.

Next up? Product images in PPC territory? Product reviews? Product blog posts? Whatever may be on the horizon for blended search it is certainly a topic that all search engine marketers, both on the organic and the paid side, should continue to keep a close eye on in 2008.

When I first joined the Closed Loop Marketing team in February 2007, I came with 3 years of online marketing experience. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and ready to start fine-tuning our clients’ pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to maximize ROI.

However, with all this helpful prior knowledge and experience, I was faced with one hurdle to jump. The agency I had worked for previously dealt mostly with B2C clients. Closed Loop Marketing on the other hand has a much greater mix of B2B clients - and highly technical ones at that.

The good news is that the core principles of managing PPC to strategic ROI goals remain the same, regardless of B2B or B2C – develop a highly targeted keyword list, write clear and compelling ad descriptions, design a landing page experience that is optimized for conversion and track, track, track (just to name a few).

With that being said, there definitely are some unique challenges to B2B search engine marketing when compared to its consumer counterpart. However, if you can redefine your expectations and approach to better meet the B2B audience, then you will find like I did that it is not nearly as intimidating as it may seem at first glance.

Challenge #1:

More complex services and products to market

With B2B, gone are the days of marketing familiar, comfortable products and services like Las Vegas hotel rooms or North Face jackets (speaking from past PPC experience with former clients). I have personally bought clothing online. I have also researched and booked hotels online more times than I can count; therefore I have the mindset of that B2C searcher and this makes setting up and managing a B2C PPC campaign that much easier.

B2B marketers are instead faced with marketing complex concepts such as WAN optimization services, corporate data loss prevention, and software build solutions to name a few (this time speaking from current client experience). Getting into the mind of this potential customer requires extra effort and brain power – BUT it can be done.

How? Read, read, read! Read the company website for starters. If the company website doesn’t convey the topic well enough for a person outside or new to the industry to fully understand, do more reading elsewhere. Read competitors’ websites – perhaps they have more information that you can latch on to for clarity. Read industry articles. And even though Wikipedia has become somewhat of a bad word in the search engine marketing industry (SEOs are tired of Wikipedia showing up #1 for anything and everything in Google organic results), I know for sure that I understood ‘Wide Area Network’ concepts much better after reading a more common-speak explanation of the topic here.

As you read, take notes jotting down important phrases that spring up in the copy - these phrases will be the springboard for your future PPC keyword list.

Also, ask for every piece of marketing collateral that you can get your hands on to read - be it direct mail, email, print, you name it. It is helpful to read how the company speaks to their customers in other mediums.

And of course, if you’re an agency meet with the client for a kick-off meeting and be sure that THEY are prepared with their own information to present in order to get you off on the right foot to understanding their offerings and key business objectives.

Challenge #2:

Higher costs per conversion than B2C.

Profitable costs per conversion (costs per lead) for B2B campaigns are often $50 to $100 to $200 or more depending on the product… whereas B2C advertisers are used to acquisition costs that are MUCH, much lower (not as a rule, but typically).

If you think about it, it is quite logical to expect higher costs per acquisition for a B2B campaign. This isn’t a $100 hotel room that you’re trying to sell online – it is often times an enterprise solution that costs tens of thousands of dollars in many cases. If a lead that you spend $50-$100 to capture online turns into a $10,000 closed deal, that’s a pretty phenomenal ROI!

Find out what the typical cost per lead is from the company’s current marketing channels – online and offline. This will at least give you a baseline goal to aim for initially. More often than not, you’re going to find that you will far surpass this initial goal, given a well set-up PPC campaign that is tracked religiously and refined over time for optimal ROI. Why? Because it’s just plain hard to beat a marketing channel where the customer is actively searching for you and you’re just putting yourself out there for the taking. Doesn’t get much better than that… which is why B2B PPC often produces a lower cost per conversion than other B2B online and offline channels.

Challenge #3:

Landing pages that service, rather than sell.

Many B2B advertisers are not out to push an immediate sales transaction online, because their products and services are not of that nature. The initial goal is to capture a lead, not an on-the-spot sale. You want to expose your brand and product/service to this potential customer who is searching explicitly for your offerings, with the goal of becoming part of their initial consideration set.

For this reason, many B2B companies build landing pages around lead generation forms. The offer received upon form completion (lead capture) can be an industry whitepaper, a free trial, a free evaluation or some other type of informational resource.

What good does this do? The answer is well summed up in a Search Engine Watch blog post by Eric Enge, Selling or Servicing?. Granted this article is more geared toward SEO and your website as a whole, but the principles certainly apply when you’re thinking about your approach to B2B landing pages:

Provide the best, and most accessible, information. Teach them what they need to know to become a smart buyer. Provide useful tools. Do a good job with this, and you will begin to build a relationship with that person, and trust.

If they learn everything they need to know on your site, your chances of moving to the next step with them is greatly increased.Whether you are selling leads, providing services, selling products, or whatever, it doesn’t matter. The big winners will focus on servicing their users, not selling to them.

In line with this ’servicing’ approach, it’s important to note that in the B2B world, the people viewing and clicking through on your PPC ads are often the company influencers - NOT the CEO and decision makers. These influencers are tasked with researching possible solutions with the goal of bringing back their top recommendations for the decision makers.

For this reason, it is quite important to make sure that your landing pages and the offer itself do a good job of servicing the influencer. The landing page and resources you are giving them should provide the key, persuasive information needed to make a ‘yes’ decision about your product – or at least a strong ‘maybe’ that will then be compared and contrasted to other solutions in the decision making process. Include industry information and research that the searcher may not find elsewhere, main features and benefits of your products/services, free trials if possible, comparisons to competitors if relevant and even pricing when you can (even if it is just a range).

Challenge #4:

Longer sales cycles leading to harder to measure ROI.

Quite simply a $10K enterprise-level solution doesn’t sell overnight. The days of instant gratification are gone.

Well not entirely… With B2B, you do at least get the instant gratification of having a form completion for a whitepaper download or demo view show up in your PPC interface as a conversion. But when it comes to getting true revenue numbers that can be translated to concrete ROI calculations, it can take several months or more for this to happen depending on the company’s typical sales cycle.

Therefore, back-end closed-loop tracking is necessary. Make sure that all leads are properly tagged in the lead management system your company or client is using – be it Salesforce or a home-grown proprietary lead tracking system. By doing so, not only will you know which campaigns are converting to a form completion on the front end given your PPC tracking codes, but you will also be able to track that lead all the way through to close in the lead management system. This is so very important, given the fact that true ROI only comes about when that person who completed your lead generation form months ago, finally bites the bullet and signs the dotted line for a sale.

In closing, I am happy to say that I now find B2B search marketing to be just as engaging as my old B2C comfort zone. And most importantly it proves consistently to be a highly profitable marketing channel for each of our B2B clients! My trepidation went away when I redefined my expectations and tackled the new challenges head-on with new strategies in-hand.

Along the way I’ve read some insightful articles that have helped shape and guide my thinking about B2B search marketing. Here is a compilation of resources that are definitely worth the read, all courtesy of Search Engine Land:

Driving Online Registrations: Think Beyond the White Paper
Four Steps to Better Business Leads from Search
Leveraging Existing Assets for B2B SEO
Better B2B Landing Pages: A Case Study
Marketing Sherpa’s Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide

Lastly, I’ll be in San Francisco October 29-30 for a great opportunity to catch up on the latest in B2B at MarketingSherpa’s B-to-B Demand Generation Summit 2007. If MarketingSherpa’s quality of products, handbooks and guides are any indication of the quality of their conferences, the Summit should be well worth the while.

Stay tuned early November, as I will be sure to provide a recap from the event with the key takeaways…

When my brother, sisters and I were growing up, my father used to throw out all kinds of random euphemisms in everyday conversations. Some are expressions that you’ve probably heard yourself from time to time. One or two of them I actually wonder if he cleverly made up himself because I’ve never, ever heard them elsewhere. “Amy, you’re digging where there are no potatoes!” Huh? These expressions became such common staples in our household that my siblings and I affectionately refer to them now as
‘Mike-isms’.

Though I didn’t entirely grasp the meaning of these expressions when I was younger, I eventually decoded these cryptic metaphors and they have stuck with me into adulthood. In fact, oddly enough I came to the realization the other day that many of these ‘Mike-isms’ happen to have a great deal of relevance in the SEO world.

“Stop Digging Where There Are No Potatoes”

What it Means As a Mike-ism: Wasting effort, energy and/or emotion worrying about something that might never even happen or that is based on mere speculation.

What it Means As a SEO-ism: In the SEO world, digging where there are no potatoes translates to the non-art of arbitrarily picking keywords to optimize your site pages for and spending months waiting for high rankings… just to find out that either a) these are not terms targeted to your audience and therefore they are not driving traffic or conversions; or b) you’ve chosen terms that have little to no search volume because you didn’t bother to use keyword research tools. Essentially, you’ve wasted the past 2-3 months digging where there are no SEO potatoes (or ‘organic’ potatoes if you will).

How to Avoid Digging Where There Are No SEO Potatoes: Quite simply, use keyword tools such as Keyword Discovery, WordTracker or the plethora of other free and paid options to decide which terms to target – not your gut. Focus your efforts on choosing terms that have a balance of sufficient search volume to fuel traffic and conversions, reasonable competition, a direct tie-in to information rich pages on your site and that are well-focused (ie. don’t be foolish and try to optimize for the term ‘car’ simply because you are a car dealer in Boise, Idaho because it will NEVER happen).

Additionally, if you have the means to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign for a good 1-3 months before starting SEO efforts, definitely do so! Take advantage of what my colleague Sandra Niehaus refers to as the ‘Ferrari of Search’. PPC represents a unique opportunity to test hundreds to thousands of keywords in the real market and determine which ones truly convert and produce the best ROI. During this PPC test period, be sure to use Exact Match in Google and Standard Match in Yahoo to ensure that the terms that receive reported conversions are actually the terms that were searched.

Also, run a variety of A/B tests on ad copy so that you can learn which elements resonate best with your key audiences. Apply this knowledge to your meta descriptions to increase organic click-through.

View it as a case study. Take this newfound, real-world, valuable knowledge and apply it to your SEO efforts… and this time get your SEO efforts right the first time around.

***And oh yeah… by the way, “Digging Where There Are No SEO Potatoes” is also known as “Barking up the Wrong Tree”***

“Burning Your Candle at Both Ends”
What it Means As a Mike-ism: Doing too much and overexerting yourself.

What it Means As a SEO-ism: In SEO world, this is the practice of over-optimizing. You burnt your SEO candle at both ends when you suddenly and not-so-inconspicuously enlisted 2000 inbound links to your site - seemingly from nowhere and practically overnight. Your target keywords are used repeatedly, excessively and un-naturally throughout your copy. You’ve left no title tag, meta description, alt tag, heading tag or keyword tag unturned. And, being the overachiever that you are, you did it ALL in the course of a day… for all 142 pages of your site. Phew!

Not only have you angered the search engine gods, but you’ve also managed to achieve a hideous user experience as your copy now reads something like:

“We sell red shoes of all types. We have Nike red shoes, Reebok red shoes, Adidas red shoes and many other name-brand red shoes. If you like red shoes, be sure to come check out our red shoes.”

How to Avoid Burning Your SEO Candle at Both Ends: Know that if you are sacrificing user experience for SEO rankings, then you are overdoing it. If you’re lucky you may achieve some fleeting and fickle high rankings, but don’t think for a second that this will be a long term trend. In time, you will inevitably burn your SEO candle at both ends.

Instead, apply logical optimization techniques focusing initial efforts on well-written title tags, meta descriptions (not necessarily for ranking importance, but to entice click-through), alt tags and headings. Make copy tweaks to tie in variations of your targeted terms, but be absolutely sure that any changes you make do not diminish the quality of the copy from a human perspective.

In the midst of all of this onsite optimization, begin the ongoing process of seeking out relevant inbound links that are a natural complement to your offerings.

“Making a Mountain Out of a Molehill”
What it Means As a Mike-ism: Making a bigger deal out of something than it really is.

What it Means As a SEO-ism: Achieving Top 10 rankings (woo-hoo!), but yet those high rankings don’t drive traffic and/or conversions to your site (ohhh…).

A great example of making a mountain out of a SEO molehill, years ago a company looking for SEO services issued a ‘challenge’. They were shopping out several agencies and a so-called ‘competitor’ told them they could guarantee to get them in the #1 position in Google for ‘Ann Arbor intellectual property attorney”. They wanted to know who else could promise the same.

OK… first of all, most of us would have to agree that guaranteeing #1 rankings often equates to false, empty promises. #1 rankings should not be guaranteed, long tail term or not, as we do not control the search engines, we simply influence them.

But aside from that point of contention, I suppose ‘Ann Arbor intellectual property attorney’ sounds really great and all, but upon digging deeper it turns out to have negligible search volume:

(Source: Google AdWords Keyword Tool; Keyword Discovery confirms zero search volume as well)

By all means, anyone with SEO experience could very well get this company to rank highly, even #1, for ‘Ann Arbor intellectual property attorney’ if they chose to focus their efforts here! But they certainly would be trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Any bottom-line focused SEO professional would rather help this company rank highly for terms that are actually going to send potential clients to their website… otherwise what’s the point?

How to Avoid Making Mountains Out of SEO Molehills: Know that Top 10 or #1 rankings are only a means to an end. Don’t assume that just because you are #1 for any given term that your job is done. It’s not.

Gauge SEO success instead by traffic, leads and sales - and make sure you are tracking online activity religiously to prove it. SEO is an ongoing cycle of executing, measuring and testing, analyzing and revising as needed to get it right. If you find that the ‘rock star’ term that you thought was going to bring you search engine fame isn’t proving to be as fabulous as you anticipated, don’t be afraid to change gears and go back to the beginning with new terms to target, if need be.

Lastly, I couldn’t help it… I felt some odd compulsion to bring in a modern day expression translated to a SEO-ism - I suppose for the sake of staying young, fresh and hip…

“Oh no you di’int!” (must be accompanied by a furiously wagging finger).
What it Means as a Mike-ism: Okay… my dad most definitely would not say “Oh no you di’int”. But it can often be heard on Jerry Springer episodes or MTV reality shows.

What it Means as a SEO-ism: What the Google Search Quality Team says right before they put you in the penalty box for black hat techniques. In use…

Matt Cutts: “White on white text? Oh no you di’int!”

How to Avoid Google’s ‘Oh No You Di’int!’: Best put by Jill Whalen in a recent Search Engine Land article: “Good, professional SEO that puts users first while keeping search engines in mind would never be considered spam by any stretch of a search engineer’s imagination.”

There’s nothing I like better than when Google AdWords decides to make our lives as search marketers just a bit easier. If you’re interested in working smarter and improving campaign results, be sure to check out two of the more recent reporting roll-outs - Google’s new Placement Performance Reports and Search Query Reports.

Google Placement Performance Reports – Finally… We now have visibility and CONTROL over where our ads display in the Content Network given Google AdWords’ relatively new Placement Performance Reports.

For the sake of providing some historical context, there definitely has been an evolution in terms of Google’s Content Network offerings. We were granted some control years back when Google decided to let us set separate bids for Content v. Search (and by the way, if you aren’t bidding separately for the Content and Search Networks, you really need to make this change – these really should be viewed and managed separately, as they are entirely different beasts).

The ability to bid separately for Content and Search was definitely a big step towards more control.

Then, another not-so-small victory came about when Google decided to let us exclude sites – nice feature, and another step towards more control. But given that most account managers don’t take the time to dive into their log files, this didn’t help much for those who were clueless as to the source of their traffic in the first place.

But now with Google’s new Placement Performance report, we’ve got quick and easy visibility coupled with control. These reports allow you to see exactly which Content sites are sending you traffic and conversions, and therefore make the right decisions to improve your campaign’s ROI from the Content Network (as opposed to throwing your hands up in the air in frustration and pausing the Content Network all together as many of us did in the past).

For those sites that are driving costly traffic yet few or no conversions, go to your Tools link and choose the Site Exclusion option to eliminate future clicks from these lower performing websites.

For those sites that show up in your Placement Performance Reports as top performers, consider maximizing your exposure by setting up a Site Targeting campaign. With a Site Targeting campaign, you can explicitly choose which sites you want to appear on and therefore maximize exposure on your most effective placements. However, note that I say ‘consider’ Site Targeting because there is one major caveat – you end up paying on a CPM basis if you do this and in my experience thus far, this is a big downgrade in ROI. I’m personally willing to give up the increased control in order to keep my coveted CPC pricing model.

The Placement Performance Reports combined with Site Exclusion is definitely a great combination for increasing ROI on the Content Network… though I have to mention one big flaw. Domain ads. You’ll notice in your Placement Performance Reports that there are line items that say ‘Domain ads’, which refer to Google ads that show up on parked domains. In our experience, these parked domains drive lots of clicks and few conversions… yet currently, Google will not allow advertisers to opt out of domain ads, as you can with individual sites.

Overall though, a thumbs up to Google for granting us this increased level of visibility.

Google Search Query Reports – If you are using Broad or Phrase Match, then Google’s new Search Query Reports will definitely be your friend. Downloading a Search Query report will allow you to pull statistics including conversion information for the specific search queries that were used by the searcher who clicked through on your ad – as opposed to seeing metrics only for the term you were explicitly bidding on in AdWords.

I definitely recommend pulling this report ASAP if you have not already. You will be quite shocked at the terms that you are phrase and broad matching to currently. Many are so completely and totally off the mark it is not even funny - which in turn is creating a whole lot of buzz and well-warranted discontent regarding Google’s Expanded Broad Match (check out Expanded Broad Match Hurting AdWords Advertisers and Up The Creek With Google AdWords Broad Match).

Here are some suggestions for taking the Search Query report data and converting it into a positive in terms of ROI.

For those terms that are driving traffic yet not converting, set up negative keywords in your campaigns and/or ad groups; thus eliminating this ineffective traffic.

For those terms that are driving effective traffic and conversions within your ROI benchmarks, yet you aren’t explicitly bidding on them (the broad or phrase matched terms), go ahead and add these terms to your campaign. Even though you’re already showing up for these terms, you can maximize exposure and control by bidding on them individually.

Learn more about Google Placement Reports:
How to Use Google’s Placement Report and Site Exclusion to Cut Your Customer Acquisition Costs by 20%
Google Content Placement Performance Report Rollout

Learn more about Google Search Query Reports:
My Newfound Love: Google AdWords Search Query Reports
Searching Beyond the Paid: Google AdWords’ Search Query Report …

Bravo to Google for giving us the tools to increase ROI from our online campaigns!