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 Google+ 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 Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

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.

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.

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 Google+ and Twitter as well as LinkedIn.

Five questions (and answers) about Data Analytics

Last December I heard +Jim Sterne speak at the Chicago DAA (Digital  Analytics Association) Symposium.  Jim is the founder of DAA and shared some key points that I thought might be helpful to my students as well as others interested in this field.

1.  What is Digital Analytics?  Jim says Analytics is more than data.  It means being able to look at customer data intelligently.The job is not just to  to make the data look nice but to make money, provide insights.

2.  What is going to be the 'sexiest' job of the 21st century?  According to Harvard Business Review, the data scientist!  This recent HBR article  talks about how LinkedIn use data science to improve how people interact with the site by suggesting people that they should know and asking them to connect.  The click-through rates on these suggestions of "People You May Know" were phenomenally high and contributed to LinkedIn's exponential growth.

3.  What do Employers need?  Companies need analyst skills like the mechanics and technology of data analysis, such as, the ability to collect, clean,  transform integrate data, store and report on it. Equally or even more important are  human-centric skills, which are explore,  analyze,  communicate,  monitor and predict.  I think this is what we call a 'whole brain thinker,' both right and left brain skills.

4.  What about this process cannot be automated?  Monitor and predict can be automated but explore, analyze and communicate, critical thinking and creativity, really are things that only human beings can do.  This is where we as data 'scientists' can add value to the organization.

5.  What further skills will the Data Scientist require?

KNOWLEDGE:  The ability to understand concepts from technology, math/statistics,  business
INTELLIGENCE:  The ability to multitask, be multilingual, a problem-solver  
CREATIVITY: The ability to drive insight from data.

Jim said to think about the Hierarchy of Data to Wisdom in this way:

Data:  This is a tomato

Information: A tomato is a fruit

Knowledge:  Fruit salad is good for you

Wisdom:  Don't put tomatoes in fruit salad

Insight:  Treat tomatoes like vegetables.

(Although I would put Wisdom as the highest form of knowledge as is traditional; Wisdom is an eternal principle  so I would say that an insight is that fruit salad does not taste good with tomatoes from which comes the Wisdom to treat tomatoes like vegetables).

Jim says Data Scientists, people who are good in Data Analytics,  make discoveries while swimming in data, their dominant trait is intense curiosity.  Right now in our Marketing 470 Marketing Technology Class we are using Google AdWords and Analytics in our AdWords projects for our corporate clients. Students seem to really enjoy looking at data and providing insights for their campaigns.  It looks like a data scientist is a rare breed and will be much in demand.  We are doing what we can in our undergraduate courses to expose the students to these concepts so they can have a chance to showcase these skills in a professional setting.  After all, Wisdom is what we seek in the educational setting, so we academics should be well-suited to helping our students along this path.  What do you think is the best way to produce "Data Scientists?"

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

NIU Interactive Students Bridge Theory/Practice Gap

We strive to create opportunities for our students to interact with companies and create real-world experience for our students.  The picture above shows a student actively networking at our Spring 2012 Internet Marketing Conference.  Last semester our Marketing Technology students worked with real-life clients like Ideosity, a web development company specializing in manufacturers with large online product catalogs to manage,  Allworld Machinery Supply, Inc. and the Department of Marketing at NIU to plan, develop and implement Paid Search and Social Media campaigns for these clients   Former Students Kalli Bravos and Tim Yapp are working at Ideosity and Allworld respectively and they wanted to come back and work with the students and learn something themselves.

We always take a strategic view of these issues, so after analyzing the competitive environment, search trends and the company's unique positioning and core strengths, the students last semester made practical suggestions to improve their clients websites.  The clients really appreciated the feedback and made changes almost immediately so they could benefit from the advice. Students then developed AdWords and social media campaigns which they implemented and measured.

Our class was even written up on Yahoo! News for our efforts.  All the clients were so happy that they agreed to come back this semester for more help and insights.  In addition, the students are helping out our own Interactive Marketing Program, which offers a Certificate in the area and teaches students paid and organic search, social media, email marketing, web site usability and testing and other real-world digital marketing skills.

This semester we are taking things a step further.  Each group right now is working on a targeted paid search campaign with a custom landing page linked to Google Analtyics as well as AdWords.  So the students will be able to provide even more analyses of their campaigns.  The students are learning how to work with IT departments to get custom landing pages put together and how to get the code that Google Analytics needs on these web pages.  I am sure they will find these skills valuable in their careers.

The second half of the semester, students will write a comprehensive social media plan for their client as well as a personal campaign for themselves, particularly highlighting how they will use Linkedin to help them in their job search.  I was just listed in the top 1% of all viewed profiles of Linkedin, so I hope this shows I am qualified to teach this material.  Of course, there are two million other people in the same category!

 Stay tuned for more news about our class and let me know if you have any questions or want to know how to hire our well-qualified graduates.  Our Internship and Job Fairs are next week and I have included a link to more information if you want to sign up.  Over 175 employers will be attending the Job Fair alone and our Interactive Students popular (we have an 85% placement rate) so don't delay getting to know these talented folks.

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

Content Marketing Makes Sense of Social Media

I recently attended a webinar on content marketing hosted by +Tim Ash of SiteTuners and featuring +Joe Pulizzi.  Joe says marketers are not only publishers, but teachers and story-tellers as well.  The graphic above illustrates Joe’s concept that marketers are all story-tellers now and tell their stories across channels. Joe gave the example of one of the first content marketers as John Deere.  That company had a new concept, a steel-tipped plough versus iron and created its own company magazine, The Furrow, to get the word out.  That magazine now has 1.5 million subscribers in 14 languages.

Contemporary examples of those doing content marketing well include Red Bull, which has its own media house within the company.  Red Bull has a record label, its own video magazine and a content pool of sports, culture and lifestyle material that  that includes a full media catalog, “plug-and-play web clips, documentaries, news pieces, photo shoots, the latest interviews, and accompanying editorials.”  The content pool contains over 50,000 photos and 5,000 videos alone.  Also, The Coca-Cola Company has four full time writers and a team of forty freelancers devoted to content marketing and has documented its strategic plan for content marketing on YouTube as it moves from ‘creative excellent’ to ‘content excellence.”

This trend toward content marketing is not restricted to large consumer brands.  

Emarketer reports in a recent survey that content marketing is the top concern of client-side marketers for 2013, having tied conversion rate optimization and vaulted ahead of social media engagement.  Fully 39% of marketers surveyed indicated that content marketing was their top concern in 2013 and the Content Marketing Institute indicates that 91% of marketers are using content marketing in some form.

Content marketing to me finally makes sense of social media marketing.  Although social media marketing no doubt has some value, firms still wrestle with measurement, how to provide meaningful content, and how to get away from what I call “Groupon Syndrome,” or focusing on short-term promotion versus brand building and engagement.  Enter the concept of content marketing and now the marketer can focus on telling the brand story across channels; add the Integrated Marketing Communications concept of telling a consistent message across channels and it is no wonder marketers are starting to see the value of content marketing.

Content marketing means every brand is in the publishing business now, creating meaningful content to tell the brand’s story and engage the consumer.  Telling the brand’s story cuts across channels and involves not only social media but SEO, Lead Generation and other channels. The content we are talking about is media owned by the company, often times re purposed for many types of marketing communications.  Branding is more important now than ever as the web gives us access to so much information that products and services are in more danger than ever of becoming a commodity.

Part of my job as a professor of marketing is to help make sense of marketing trends and create meaningful frameworks to explain and describe them.  Although social media is fascinating and fun, social media marketing cannot operate in a vacuum.  Content marketing makes social media make sense as a natural vehicle for telling the story of the brand and allowing customers to engage with the brand.  Seeing social media in the context of content marketing, where the same stories are deployed through other media channels, to me legitimizes social media marketing and puts it in context of other media channels.  What do you think? 

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

Tips from the FTC for Mobile Marketing

Mobile applications are critical to today’s marketing environment.  The number of Smartphone users is skyrocketing.   The Pew Research Center indicates that 45% of adults and 66% of Americans aged 18-29 have a Smartphone and 25% of adults own a tablet.   According to a survey by ReturnPath quoted in Joel Book’s Exact Target blog, nearly half of all emails are read on mobile devices.  What this trend means is that marketers need to get savvy about all aspects of mobile marketing, including best practices in privacy and security.  Mobile marketing has expanded to include SMS/text messages, in-app advertising, mobile action codes like QR codes, mobile coupons, check-in promotions, mobile payments or other aspects of digital wallets, emails, telemarketing calls to a mobile devices, RFID tags and much more.

Mobile Marketing has its challenges because fewer ads display on mobile devices and users are still somewhat reluctant to purchase on them (although they seem to be more likely to purchase on tablets rather than Smartphones).  All this will certainly change as users become more familiar with these devices.

I recently attended the Promotion Marketing Association Marketing (PMA, recently rechristened BAA, Brand Activation Association) Promotion Law conference in Chicago which covered some practical tips for launching mobile applications.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is only one agency involved in the oversight and regulation of mobile marketing is charged with protecting consumers and suggests these tips for implementing mobile marketing applications.

      1.  Tell the Truth.  Tell the truth about what your app can do.  False or misleading claims anger users and can land you in legal hot water.  If you have health safely or performance claims (i.e., our pedometer will help you lose weight), you need to back these up with solid scientific evidence.  Disclosure must be ‘clear and conspicuous,’ which is not always easy on small screens.

      2.   Respect Privacy.  The mobile application, unlike the company’s legacy applications, may offer the chance to incorporate privacy concerns from the beginning, which the FTC calls ‘privacy by design’  The FTC suggests only collecting the information you need, storing it securely and disposing of it when no longer needed.  Some other privacy tips include:

a.       Being transparent about data practices

b.      Honoring published privacy practices

c.       Protecting Children’s privacy by adhering to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and getting parental consent before collecting information from children under 13 years of age.

      3. Offer choices that are easy to find. Tools that allow for choices in how to use the app and have privacy settings, opt-outs and other ways to control their information is good business practice.  The standard should be ‘clear and conspicuous;’ make privacy choices easy to use and then follow through on your promises.

You can get more information from the “Marketing Your Mobile App Get it Right from the Start” and other documents available at business.ftc.gov.  How hard do you think it is it to follow these guidelines and implement a successful mobile app?

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

Integrating Digital Marketing Thought into Digital Strategy

Hello everyone and Happy 2013!  After a brief break from blogging and a two week respite from social media over the holidays, I have lots of new ideas to share and welcome your comments.  Today I want to talk about how Interactive technology has changed the basic way we look at the marketing strategy framework. Instead of just thinking about digital strategy at the end of the process, or as another chapter, as many marketing texts do now, should we not be thinking about completely revamping the process of marketing strategy formation?

For example, we know that B2C consumers and B2B customers start their purchase process online, most usually using a search engine. How many marketing strategy books begin with the importance of search engine marketing? “Conventional” marketing wisdom states that wants became needs and then purchases. Is it not it now true that needs become searches and the results of searches become wants, which lead to more searches and ultimately to purchases? (See above graph).

This interactive marketing approach to strategy means taking into account not only the customer process for finding information but also what the customer is searching for when they search. I recently did a consulting project for a small company and they told me what they were good at, what we would traditionally consider to be a ‘core competencies’ from a marketing point of view. Unfortunately, the search trends on Google Trends indicated that search trends for these products and services were declining. Following a traditional process of identifying core competencies would not take into account what is happening with the consumer online and how they are looking for information. Would you agree as one step in updating how we think about marketing strategy that we need to incorporate digital strategy earlier into the search process?

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