Saturday, March 23, 2013

Tips & Best Practices for Paid Search


+Thorne Washington, a recent grad from Northern's IM program, and Brad Hawk, both from board member company Leapfrog Online, have been coming to my classes to share their experiences and tips on Paid Search.  The duo helped students prepared for the Google Online Marketing Challenge last year and for their Paid Search consulting project this year using Google AdWords and Analytics . The two consultants have a great framework, listed above, for analyzing, implementing and measuring a paid search campaign.

We really appreciated  Brad and Thorne's clear approach to the problem at hand. They suggested a framework for the project that they use for their own work. As shown above, they suggested that the best way to approach paid search is to Research, Build, Launch and then Analyze/Report.

I agree that planning is key to effective Search Engine Marketing (SEM). If you don't understand the customer and the keywords they are searching for it is not even useful to start a campaign. Google provides many useful analysis tools to research initially and then modify the campaign once it has been launched. We use Google Trends and the AdWords keyword tool for our initial and ongoing research.  Sometimes we found that the terms the company thought defined its business were not highly searched for by potential customers and had to make adjustments.

Building and Launching a paid search campaign, the students found, was an ongoing, iterative exercise. +Brittany Sarkisian, who is in the class right now, said that the class is interactive and allowed her to apply the concepts we have been learning in the real world. The students monitored their campaigns over a three week time frame, often not finding an effective ad/keyword/call to action combination until late in the campaign.

Some other helpful tips from Thorne and Brad included bidding 1.5 or 2 times more than the suggested initial bid in AdWords to get a high ranking and improve your click-through rate, setting the geographic area of the search, limiting the campaign to the hours of operation of the business and using Exact match when you have a small budget.  Since mobile ads are more expensive than desktop ads, the students also limited the devices on which their ads were displayed (although we may not have this choice in the future).  Thanks to both Brad and Thorne for coming out and sharing their expertise.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Three Simple FREE Things NIU Students Can Teach You About Paid Search




Our tag line says that NIU's College of Business is "Where the Classroom Meets the Business World."

As support of this concept, our students just completed a nine week module on paid search during which they planned, implemented, measured and reported the results of a Google AdWords campaign and also used Google Analytics.  The classroom met the business world as students worked with Ideosity, a consulting firm that targets developing websites, content management systems and online catalogs for manufacturers, and AllWorld Machinery, a supplier and manufacturer of replacement parts for manufacturers worldwide.  Other clients were our own Department of Marketing and Interactive Marketing program.  Thanks to our corporate clients that supported the projects and our program with their donations.  Here are three things that we learned that we hope can help you:

1)  Paid search helps your marketing even if you don't have a lot of money.  These clients were all small entities that had not had a lot of past experience with paid search.  I always recommend a paid search campaign to enhance and inform an organic search campaign, even for small firms.  You learn so much even from running the campaign a few weeks about which keywords are most appropriate and what drives firms to you web site.  You don't have to spend a lot of money to learn a lot (our students were on small budgets).  The students were able to help all their clients pinpoint what their customers were really looking for and where potential customers were located.  Just simple adjustments in geographic targeting were able to turn around campaigns from just a few clicks to hundreds within days.

2) Direct marketing calls to action do pay a large roll in paid search success.  In the first weeks of the campaign we tested our ads and keywords.  By the middle of the campaign, if the refinements we made weren't working (lots of traffic, few clicks), the students actively sought to optimize their ads by employing tested calls to action.  Just inserting the word FREE in one ad's call to action resulted in a 7% CTR. (See above).  Adding SAME DAY SHIPPING instead of Call Us Today improved an ad with 0 clicks to one with a 4.76% CTR.  So dig out those old direct marketing books and look on www.convertasaurus.com/ to help figure out what converts.

3) Paid search can tell you about your brand.  In most of our campaigns, unbranded keywords outperformed branded ones.  What better way to tell that you need to increase your brand awareness and improve your positioning?  The next step in our class project is to create plans to promote these brands on social media and engage current customers and prospects.

So there you have it, three simple ways to use Paid Search to improve your marketing efforts:  Do it to learn, use calls to action that convert and use the results to improve your brand image.

If you still don't feel confident doing this by yourself, keep following this blog for more tips.  More importantly, remember, we have forty graduates getting our Interactive Marketing certificate this May.

The students reported that they enjoyed the project, liked learning how to create campaigns and analyze them via metrics and recover quickly from their 'mishaps' along the way.  This kind of nimble thinking is just what companies tell me they are looking for in new graduates.

Hire our May grads by placing your job posting on  "Huskies Get Hired" or email me, Dr. Debra Zahay-Blatz, to join our job listserv:  zahay@niu.edu.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Friday, March 15, 2013

Report from the "Hot Seat" at Chicago AMA





The @chicagoama 'hot seat' March 14 at Catalyst Ranch, sponsored by the AMA Higher Education SIG, was a lot of fun.  There was a great group of attendees from various aspects of the marketing profession and the 'Ranch' is a great venue for creative thinking.

Here are some key takeaways from the event:


1) Social Marketing on G+ is going to explode, the group (and I)  thought.  The increased visibility on searches and the ability to share and collaborate on other Google products and platforms like drive and email will allow G+ to explode. Martin McGovern from @idealemon said that G+ is a learning center and I got home and found that Google had just launched Think Insights for the digital marketer. I did take a quick look and it appears to be a learning center for Digital Marketing 

2) Content Marketing is going to 'make sense' of social media marketing.  Start with strategy:  what are your strengths and what content should you be creating?  Think about the content that goes with reinforcing your brand image.  This content then can be re-purposed on all forms of social media, thereby integrating messages across platforms (what we used to call IMC).

3) Content Marketing is well-suited to the University environment.  We professors are creators of content.  Once professors understand that by being well-known on the web through content they will be found more easily in searches, that will motivate them to create more online content.  Tell them about Author Rank.  Other incentives may have to be used to get them going and they may have to learn to write like a blogger, not like a professor.

We talked about a number of other things, including the redesign of the Facebook page to include ads in the news feed.  I said that we are publishing a paper on this subject in our Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, on the fact that Facebook visitors don't tend to look at banner ads in the current format and why.  The Journal articles are designed to be read by both practitioners and academics so take a look and what we have published and see if it can help your marketing.

Thanks again for the great event, AMA Higher Education SIG, +Carrie Fuller, +Paul Stark and +Paula Kapacinskas and thanks to the lively and engaged attendees.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Chicago AMA "Hot Seat" Challenge Next Week









Next Thursday I am going to be on the 'hot seat' challenge with the AMA's Higher Education SIG in Chicago at Catalyst Ranch at 656 W. Randolph, Jitterbug Room at 5pm..  People will ask me questions and I will answer to the best of my ability.  Since I am a professor I always have an answer for everything so I am looking forward to the evening!

I think the big topics for higher education right now are engagement and content, the same as for most marketers.  My students have been doing AdWords projects this semester and one entire class is working specifically for units within the University.  Higher education is competitive now and the keywords are expensive, many too expensive for the budget of a student project.  Some of the students have taken the approach of asking their University clients to improve their web pages to facilitate organic search results.

Although I would not recommend abandoning paid search, I think the best strategy for a University is also to develop meaningful content on the web site that will allow for higher rankings in search engines during organic search (the results that are not ads).  Blogs, videos, images, whitepapers and other types of content are looked upon favorably by search engines in organic or 'natural' search rankings.

My blog (which is with blogger, a company owned by Google) gets ranked highly on my own personal search engine results page when I am logged in to Gmail and I can also see which of my professional acquaintances has posted on relevant topics.  You can see above I recently created a post on 'tag management '  However, blogs are given weight by all search engines, as are other forms of content.  When my class did a viral video project, the organic search rankings for our program soared.  This success is documented in +Aaron Goldman's book Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google.

I would ask what organization is better suited than a University to create original content?  Universities have experts available in every academic department.  These experts can be showcased on the University's website to enhance the social 'reputation' of the University.

These experts can also help with engagement.  Another topic is engagement and social media can work to improve engagement.  DeVry University is connecting current and perspective students with subject matter experts that are available on faculty and staff.  I think the challenge will be to incent and motivate faculty and staff to contribute.  When faculty see that social media participation improves how they are viewed as an expert in their field, I think they will be more likely to participate.  I look forward to 'engaging' you on these topics at Catalyst Ranch.  Register for the event here.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Tag Management by Joe-Stanhope




Joe Stanhope from Forrester Research:  On Tag Management

Last week as we worked on Google AdWords and Analytics in class, we talked about 'auto-tagging' our results which brought up the subject of tags...what are tags?  Tags, simply put, are code 'snippets' that allow third party tracking, analysis and reporting.  Google Analytics and other web analytics programs such as Adobe Omniture.  Auto-tagging in AdWords allows you to tell which ad was clicked to get to your destination URL, even if you have more than one ad pointing to the URL.  As you can imagine, the whole process of attribution and analytics can be confusing.  

Enter tag mangement to help with these issues.   At the DAA (Digital Analytics Association) Symposium in Chicago last December, +Joe Stanhope of Forrester Research talked about tag management and tag management systems.   Before efficient tag management systems, it might have taken the organization eight weeks to change a tag relating to a particular marketing campaign and the campaign could easily be over by that time.

Tag management systems are more efficient in that users can often control their own data. Because technologies make tag management faster and more efficient  data can be analyzed more quickly and changes implemented (based on the resulting data) to optimize campaigns.  

There can be 35 to 50 tags on an e-commerce marketing page and it can take a long time to wait for internal IT or an outside web developer to make these changes. Joe said 90% of companies don't want to wait for these systems.

Companies can also benefit from these systems by auditing their pages and getting ride of tags that are not being used.  Joe mentioned that BrightTag is one tag management firm and Google has recently made their Google Tag Manager free and available to users.   According to Joe, tag management has a bright future and can be beneficial to organizations.  Enjoy this video in which Joe further describes the organizational benefits of tag management.  Joe has been a long-time member of our advisory board and a good friend to our program.  Keep up the good work keeping us informed.

By Debra Zahay-Blatz.
You can find Debra on and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.