Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Mobile App Comes To Verizon Android Handsets Microsoft previously said there was going to be an Android version of Bing soon, following its successful iPhone app. Today there is — for Verizon Android [...]

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Microsoft previously said there was going to be an Android version of Bing soon, following its successful iPhone app. Today there is — for Verizon Android handsets only however. It was announced on the Bing Community Blog. I’m sure a more general Bing-Android app will be out in the not to distant future. Although it’s overshadowed by [...]

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After months of being without a long-term content deal, Google and the Associated Press have finally renewed their vows. Google will continue to host AP stories on Google News and have access to AP’s news feeds without fear that the AP will make legal claims against the company. From the announcement: We’ve extended our existing licensing [...]

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Last week Google acquired Angstro. The site has been described as a way to discover and organize information about individuals across various professional networks. Here’s how Angstro describes itself: Ångströ represents the ability to hone in on highly focused, relevant news across professional networks. Where search engines such as Google and other news aggregator [...]

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Google plans pay-per-view films from the Financial Times reports Google is in talks with several major Hollywood film companies to offer a pay-per-view service of their films. Reports say that the streaming movie service from YouTube will bring these movies to online consumers at about $5 per movie. The movies would not download to [...]

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Google has a special logo on many of the Google properties, not Google U.S., for Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley is well known for novel, Frankenstein. The Google Doodle is a gothic theme, which conveys Mary Shelley’s work as a writer. She started writing Frankenstein at the age of 18, completed it a [...]

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Will this year be the year when online holiday sales return to double digit growth? Or will the holidays once again deliver lackluster growth in the low single digits for online advertisers? While predicting how much consumers will buy may be difficult, predicting how they will likely behave is not. We recently [...]

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In my last Paid Search column I wrote about six common business fallacies that lead paid search managers to spend time unproductively. Unproductive work is costly in that someone internally or externally is paid to do work that adds no value, and that same person is prevented from doing work that is valuable. Prioritizing tasks [...]

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Early bird rates for Search Marketing Expo – SMX East end soon. Save up to $300 on your All Access ticket by registering now! Why should you join us October 4-6 in New York City? More than 100 of the world’s most knowledgeable speakers will present at SMX East. They’re selected based on ability AND willingness [...]

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If you a) believe in the power of search—as a technology, as a consumer experience and as a business model, and b) believe in the economic promise of the “local” opportunity, then you need to commit to a simple axiom: the ultimate destiny of a local search is a phone call. Two relatively new macro trends [...]

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Servers play an important role in SEO and deserve more attention than they get. Tips on domains, subdomains, international search implications, and redirects. ...

Senior VP Shashi Seth claims Yahoo will always be a search engine, even though CEO Carol Bartz told us that Yahoo has never been a search company. Can we help Yahoo find a cure for their identity crisis? ...

We’re delighted to announce that Yelp Chief Operating Officer Geoff Donaker will be in the spotlight for SMX East’s second day keynote on Tuesday, October 5th. Combining local search with customer reviews, special offers and a healthy dose of social interaction, Yelp is an indispensable resource for local businesses and those who enjoy “getting out [...]

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by Eric Brown

Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble. I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future by any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor, however the past couple of years of operating our boutique apartment rental business in SE Michigan has had more challenges than we ever imagined. But as with all struggles, there has been a bright side, a bubble burst quickly trims out the weeds and the low hanging fruit.

Perhaps a Social Media Weeding is forthcoming
2010 has been the year that many small and mid size businesses have taken the plunge, and embraced the throws of Social Media Marketing. With that, nearly every unemployed straggler has hung out their Social Media Consultant shingle.

As reported in the Harvard Business Review...
"During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt -- debt that couldn't be made good on. Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections -- linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships." Low Barrier to Entry
Whenever the barrier to entry is low, to non existent, pitfalls loom. While the real estate bubble happened due to a multitude of reasons, whenever someone can sell a condo several times before the builder finished construction, and each selling party profits, all is well and good until the market falls off. It then becomes musical chairs and the last person standing is holding the bag. When profit occurs absent anyone really doing anything or adding any value, a Weed and Trim typically follows. Problem is, we aren't very adept at history or awareness.

Panera Bread is My Office
Nothing against the Nomads or Entrepreneurs, we all started somewhere, but when your only cost of business or overhead is your laptop, lots of crazies are suddenly Internet marketers and social media marketers. And, by all means, some of this lot are pretty smart. However once the check writers (the business owners) start requiring results, many of these Cast of Social Media Characters will evaporate as quickly as they spawned.

What is the Correction
Results, or lack there of will lead the correction. Business isn't as complicated as we try to make it. If you are doing Internet marketing or social media marketing for your client, and they aren't selling more stuff, you may well get fired, as you should. Marketing is and has always been about selling more stuff to more people for more money.

Engagement, Conversation, Connections and all of the buzz words of today won't cut it if sales leads don't increase. The truth is, Social Media Marketing is so much more than a Facebook page and a Twitter account. While there are lots of businesses and agencies doing a stellar job, many are not, and it seems the honeymoon may be coming to a close for those that lack the experience of delivering a real and measurable result.

Are your clients selling more stuff from your Social Media Marketing Campaigns?

We would love to hear your feedback. You can connect with Eric on Twitter or at The Urbane Way.

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Google has added a new filter to its blog search option that makes it easier to find blogs themselves, not just individual blog posts. The filter is part of Google.com search, not Google’s specific Blog Search service at blogsearch.google.com. The filter appears in the left-side menu. When you choose the Blogs option after your search, it [...]

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Google has launched a new videoblog series that will highlight “some of the hottest searches” on Google’s U.S. search engine. It’s called The Google Beat, and the first weekly video was published this morning. Here’s how Google explains it: Using data from Google Trends, Google Insights for Search and some additional tools, the Google Beat will [...]

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Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder and one of the richest men on earth, has filed a patent infringement suit today against several Internet titans, the Wall Street Journal reports. The lawsuit centers on technology developed a decade ago by Interval Research Corp., a technology lab that Allen owned between 1992 and 2000. Eleven companies are [...]

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: International SEM Goes Beyond Simple Translation: Q&A With Latin3’s Matias Perel Because only a fraction of the world’s population resides here in the United States, the idea of global reach is a tempting one. [...]

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by Mike Fleming

If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn't you?), you're always testing.  Always.  It's the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels.  One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.

Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from different time periods (except for ads).  For example, you'd have to run ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the new bid price for a while.  Then, you'd have to compare the results from different time periods.  The problem? When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes.  But fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.

Google's example of this involves advertising for soccer balls.  "Let's say you're advertising soccer balls, and you decide to increase your bids to get more traffic. Two days later, the World Cup starts, and your clicks and impressions increase substantially. If you had simply raised the bids in your campaign without running an experiment, you wouldn't know how much of the increase in traffic is due to the World Cup, and how much is a result of you increasing bids."

Let's say you raised your bids at the beginning of June and noticed this trend when doing analysis in July....

Alright, looks great.  Let's go ahead and keep that new bid.  What?  What's that?  That might not be the best thing.  Well now, why would that be?

Ouch.  That's web search volume trends for that keyword phrase.  Not so fast my friend.

Enter the newest "seedless watermelon" in the AdWords system called AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE).  With ACE, you can run simultaneous split tests with most of the key variables in your campaigns by splitting traffic between you "control" group (original) and your experiment group...AND...you can analyze the results of your tests before you apply them to all auctions.  This lowers the risk of diving into new, unproven strategies by enabling you to control the amount of traffic you send to your experimental groups; which ultimately helps you make better decisions in your optimization efforts.  You can split your traffic in 10% intervals from 90/10 all the way to 10/90.

The cool thing about this is that if you want to run a low-risk experiment  and send 80% of your traffic to your control group and 20% to your experiment group, you can analyze the results and find if the changes performed better.  If they did, then you can run what is called a holdback experiment before you fully applied the changes to your campaigns.  A holdback experiment involves running the exact same experiment again, but this time with the control at 20% and the experiment at 80%.  This way, you confirm that the positive effects of your experiment are truly there as the experiment is exposed to a larger amount of traffic.

When you go to analyze an experiment, you want make sure that the statistical differences in your numbers is meaningful rather than the result of random chance.  Statistical significance is calculated based both on the number of auctions your campaign participated in, and on the size of the differences in metrics. Google AdWords provides icons in your campaign when the math indicates that you can be 95%, 99%, or 99.9% confident that differences are meaningful, and not just due to chance.

The icons are arrows that show you whether a particular element you're experimenting with has achieved statistically significant results, and how confident you can be that those results will carry over to your campaign if you apply the experiment (one arrow meaning there is a 5% probability your results occurred due to chance, two arrows means there is a 1% chance, and three arrows means there is just a 0.1% chance these results are due to chance).

The introduction of this new feature saves the account manager time and makes testing in your AdWords account much more accurate, efficient and profitable.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

by Stoney deGeyter

When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it's your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it's that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.

Think about it. If you're not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or "figure it out on their own". But, for anybody that's doing anything new, directions are a God send.

I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I'll be the first to admit that I'm generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn't help. Not even a little.

The desk had two pieces: the main desk and a small side table. Both look nearly identical, only the size is different. The directions started you out building the small table...but they didn't make that clear. I spent at least 30 minutes putting together the larger desk with the small table instructions, wondering why things just weren't making much sense.

Once I figured that out and moved on to building the desk with proper directions, I found several pieces that all looked similar, but with subtle differences. The directions didn't make those distinctions, neither verbally nor visually. Luckily, I was able to stay calm and keep the cursing to a low mumble that my kids couldn't hear!

Your content should work like directions. It needs to inform and make clear what the next step is. Giving your visitors clear directions doesn't have to be difficult. You don't have to re-write all of your content, adding in long prose of "here's what we want you to do next". All you have to do is some simple re-working of key areas.

Action Words: We often tend to write passively. We talk in terms of how things are, not in terms of what we are doing, what we've done, or what we want to do. This makes our content stagnant.

Instead, use words that convey action. Tell visitors how you achieved your knowledge or skills. Tell them how they will benefit from your product or services. Give them examples of the results they will see. And, most importantly, give them some calls to action.

Calls to Action: Using action words is never more important than ensuring your work calls action into your content. These are the directives that you provide to your visitors that lead them down the path to the conversion.

If you are not providing these directives, or are providing the wrong directives, you won't be getting the response you want from your visitors. Keep in mind that there are multiple paths to the goal. Customers need to see your products before they can buy them. They also need to know product details. Trying to move your customers to the conversion too quickly simply won't work.

Use your calls to action to lead visitors down the path of information they need to take the desired action. Some may need to see product reviews, others need to read more about your company, and still others might want to read more about what you offer. Provide calls to action to whatever your visitors might need... because they may not even know they need it.

Textual Links: Adding calls to action directly into your text is simply the best way to get visitors to heed them. Your navigation is important, but sites often put too much faith in the navigation getting the visitors to the information they want. If the visitors know where they want to go, and if they are willing to take the time to click through the navigation, then that approach would work. But, why force the visitor to disengage from your content to hunt through the navigation for what they want? Not a good idea.

That's the biggest problem with not using textual links. You're forcing your visitors to figure things out instead of providing them the directions they need right there where they are. If they are reading about your team's experience, then link to your "About Us" page. If you mention a related product, link to it. If you discuss a significant achievement, place a link to the page that provides more complete information about it.

Visitors are curious. Providing links helps them satisfy their curiosity, which in, turns gives them more satisfaction that you have "what it takes" to provide what they need.

A website that's not getting any action is a dead site. Conversion rates will be low, and bounce rates will be high. Using action words, calls to action, and textual links gets your visitors to "put out". But, unless your content is willing to provide the goods, you may not even get to second base.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.

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