Boise and GEO Targeting

Let’s say you want to sell a Toyota in Boise, Ohio.

Most people would set up an IP targeting campaign and use keywords like “toyota” and “camery”. This, is the best & most logical place to start. What about that other half of (bastard) searchers who type “boise toyota”. Chances are their SERP’s will be scartered with Idaho related PPC ads.

How do you fix that…

IP Campaign Keywords: “toyota” & “boise ohio toyota”

GEO Campaign Keywords: “boise idaho toyota”

Please, always include the state. Depending on the size of the campaign you could blow your entire ad budget if your small market shares the same name as any much larger market.

That is all.

SEM Campaigns Can Be Your Greatest Sales Force

Business’ goal is to increase revenue.  Different combinations of media are used to increase brand and product awareness, ultimatly creating a want or delivering on a need to a customer.  Advertising campaigns, like a sales force, go out and get customers.

SEM campaigns do entirely the same thing with few, if any differences at the highest level.  Consumer Bob looks for something (online) & discovers a product that fills a need.  The website speaks in a voice that relates to Consumer Bob… he practically becomes best friends with it, and then BAM!  Mastercard numbers get punched in, 2 day shipping is selected, and Consumer Bob waits patiently for his new toy to arrive.  A pleasant bedtime story.

 How is that different than having a sales person swing by his home?  Aside from the obvious, “Gee, Waldo.. If a sales person were there, Consumer Bob would HAVE to wear clothes.”

True, Bob is comfortable being alone in his apartment, but let’s talk about dollars spent and earned… by the business.

Say Consumer Bob purchased an mp3 player for $300.  He was the only person out of 30 visiting the site at that time to actually make a purchase.  The site converted 3.33% of the customers on the site and generated $10 in revenue per visitor or $300 per sale.  Now it cost this site.. we’ll call it “pear” to get visitors.  Natural or Paid Search aside, this particular site paid $1 to get Bob there and all of the other visitors were right around the same cost (per click). 

$10 spent to make $300.  All legit math aside, that is one rocking quotient that I would enjoy delivering to clients when talking about ROI for a campaign.

Now we fast forward to a consulting company; say manufacturing.  A new metric comes into play with large B2B sales.  LTV or Lifetime Value of a customer.  A consulting gig to completion, or better yet, a renewing contract may yield $100,000 per year.

 We don’t have to kid around and say the same amount of visitors would net the same amount of sales.  I would stop writing this minute and go back to school for a degree in engineering…  We can use some bigger numbers on the search side:  $1CPC (still) and 2K visitors per sale (0.05% conversion).  $2000 in media spend would net you $100K in revenue.

How much do you pay your sales person/sales team and how much does it cost you in overhead to support them?  Obviously your website isn’t going to convert a massive man-hour contract ont he spot.  It can deliver high quality leads to pass off to your project managers and the people on the team that see their paychecks get padded the most from year-over-year growth.

In summary, SEM drives qualified leads for a totally measurable cost.  When you hire someone to go find these opportunities for you…  can you measure their performance down to the phone call?  the e-mail?  or the site visit?

- W

New Year, New Keywords?

The PPC Blog is at it again.

I challenge everyone to develop a new SET of long-tail keywords to drive new traffic that is stocked full of untold profits.

I can do it…  So can you.

Search Analyst

That is my title…   I am a Search Analyst.

The majority of my day is spent working on what someone would see when they search and how they will react to that visual.  I put that into a few excel files and… BAM… I max out one searchers credit card and some corporate marketing guys bonus check in a few short minutes.

Why don’t I spend more time searching?  Or at least finding some people to search for me and tell me what they find interesting.

Search Analyst…

Advergirl

A great post by Advergirl.  She writes about something that I’ve been thinking about lately, my career and how to advance it.

She writes an excelent marketing blog that should be added to everyone’s reader.

Analysis

The point of a paid search product isn’t to build/deploy an object and let it deliver leads or conversions.  Search Analysts need to put an idea into the engines and then take a step back to watch it behave.

Analysts, not builders.

- W, waldo@sem-fu.com

A la Carte SEO Services

I’ve been working on developing some pay-per-click and search engine optimization services to sell as an A la Carte service. The list is fairly short right now to keep the products at an extremely high level of quality. Here is the list:

• Link Building/Directory Submission - $150 - 20 links
• PPC, Targeting Review/Revision - $150
• PPC, Google -> Yahoo Migration - $200
• PPC, Brand Analysis by DMA/MSA - $300/target

I am not looking to take on 300 clients, so you have a guarantee for some personal attention. E-mail me if you have any questions, Id be happy to answer some for you or even custom tailor a new product if the project seems interesting enough.

-W, waldo@sem-fu.com

Simple ROI Optimization

Want a quick and easy way to max out your ROI?  Here is my quick tip…

Get your reports into excel in whichever manner you choose, (export to .csv, copy and paste, etc…)

Excel is smart enough to sort by equations and return only the results that fit the ‘answer’.  Set up custom sorting for the ROI and CPC columns.  Use a formula to return all results with a greater than average ROI and a less than average CPC.

The results will show you the keywords being bid for that are performing extremely well.  Go back into your paid search platform of choice and adjust your bids & budgets to focus on those keywords.

Sit back and get ready to make some more money!

Demand Fulfillment

Demand fulfillment…  When I want something, some advertiser figures out how to give it to me.  For example I want discount airline flights.  I go to Google and type in “discount airline flights to Cancun”.   A dozen advertisements down the right sidebar and a few pretty yellow background ones on top will show price points and drop a few brand names for hotels or car rental agencies they can up sell me as value added benefits.

Great..  I asked for something, Google gave it to me, and I am… … … fulfilled.

This interaction happens hundreds of thousands of times a day (just on my adwords accounts alone).  Where else is demand fulfilled?  Anywhere a buyer requests information to get a need or a want.  Travel websites, Yahoo!, or even some third tier video game portal website that I can search on all fulfill demands.

This is the easy side of internet marketing.  Find a market that has more demand than supply (simple economics) and try to exploit the market.  The difficult side of marketing is demand generation.  I’ll talk about it a little more in my next post.

- W, waldo@sem-fu.com

Web Content Monitoring

Attributer released it’s first content monitoring system. Most would expect me to take the classic line and whine about “Big Brother” or some other bullshit. Fortunately, I’m not a cry baby.

What’s the deal? This product is expensive and used by the likes of the AP and Reuters… not Bob’s Blog or his semi-shady forum.

What does it do? Automates requests. Anywhere from a link back to a request for content removal and the threat of legal action.

What it I just change the…? Nope. Not going to happen. Attributer will follow the DNA of a publisher, author, or specific paper and sniff out the plagiarism like a college senior looking for his first action of his final school year.

So, in the future if you want quality content, make sure it’s original.

Read some more about it here: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/online/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003668314

-W