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25 Sep This post is from from my other blog here A few weeks back I created a little contest that would award the best online marketing mishap story with a shiny new iPod Touch (not just new as in retail boxed, but the brand spankin’ new iPod Touch Apple just released). After receiving a healthy dose of entries, I enlisted a few online marketers from different disciplines I work with to pick the winner. Congratulations to Steve for the story he contributed regarding some suspiciously high PPC bills received by a credit union he works at for an unlikely phrase: “es sex.” Steve, your iPod touch was ordered on the Apple Store online this evening and is en route to you. Here’s Steve’s story in his own words: I work in the marketing department of a mid-sized credit union. We hired a paid search firm out of Austin that had been recommended to us by another credit union in Dallas. Our initial set-up was about $15K and our monthly spend was determined to be in the $25-30K range. Shortly after kick off the firm provided us with a massive list of keywords/phrases to review and approve. Not having any real experience doing this we asked some questions about the list but trusted the firm knew what they were doing. About two weeks after the launch of the program our webmaster noted some peculiar visitor data. We were getting a huge amount of traffic from the phrase “es sex”. Not surprising those visitors had a near 100% bounce rate. When we contacted the agency they assured us they would look into it and get back to us. About a week later we still hadnt heard back from them but still saw the massive amounts of traffic coming to the credit unions website from that term. About 23 days past the launch they called to tell us our budget had depleted quickly and we should consider increasing our spend the following month. When we demanded to see some reporting we found that nearly $8K had been spent to drive people to our site for the term “es sex”. It turns out there is large credit union named Essex. When they did their keyword research that term came up and they decided to target it. They were never able to explain exactly how Essex became es sex or how the ads they were running were even relative enough to the term to cause so many people to click through to our site but needless to say we refused to pay for their mistake and dumped them for other similarly stupid mistakes about two months later. Thanks again to everyone who participated, and look for another contest in a month or two. I’ll be posting a few of the other entries that finished close behind Steve’s in the upcoming days; hopefully you’ll enjoy them as much as I did!
23 Sep This post is from from my other blog here
When the Android device is rolled out tomorrow, search engine optimization and search engine marketing might not be the first thing that comes to mind, but if you’re an online marketer it certainly should be. The Android-powered device, like the iPhone, is acutely aware of its location. Location is desperately important for the biggest players in search, and it’s getting more important with each passing day. Search… Local Search… Mobile Search… Consider online search as it stands today. Depending on whose definition you want to go by, somewhere between 10% and 50% of online searches have local intent. For simplicity of this discussion, let’s say 25% of online search has local intent (I arrived at that percentage after mulling through a pile of data, and then coming across a great analysis of much of it by Greg Sterling). At first 25% seems high. But, if you think about it from the perspective of an average Internet user, 25% is quite reasonable. Searches with local intent covers a lot of ground: finding a restaurant, a new car, a job or home, a hotel for an upcoming trip or vacation, or a contractor to put an addition on your home. Now factor in searches being made with mobile phones. Think about their intent. 25% might actually be a conservative number. Trending for searches being performed on mobile devices? Increasing every month. Year-over-year comScore recently reported mobile search in the U.S. was up 68%. Local Data and Mobile Who is competing to be the one to serve this data? Some companies that you’re familiar with and a few you may have hung out to dry years ago. Here’s just a few:
What all the data providers want is to be THE data source for local search, paving the way for ulterior advertising motives. Google isn’t the only game in town, and they don’t have the local search market locked down by any stretch of the imagination. Google isn’t innovating in local search just because they are creative, they’re innovating in local search because they have to. With the dawn of the Internet the biggest promise was that anyone, anywhere could market or buy a product or service from anyone, anywhere. Now data is telling us something that we may have lost sight of along the way: what’s local to us is often far more important. If you look at some of Google’s most recent announcements it’s clear that being a leader in local is their agenda. Having a mobile OS is just one more sign. Local search is one of the most important search battle fields, not just for the data providers, but for marketers whose clients need a presence there.
06 Sep This post is from from my other blog here Whether you’re an SEO company, a search marketing consultant, or a company who has hired either of the two, you’ve likely come across at least one colossal blunder made by a self-proclaimed search engine optimization expert or online marketing company. I see this all the time, but wanted to get a gauge on what others have experienced. I’m hoping to get some good ones, so I’m going to put up a new iPod Touch (8 GB) as a prize for the winner.
Comments to this post won’t be treated as entries. Please, post your SEO company stupidity story using my Contact form. It doesn’t have to be a SEO blunder “proper” (it could be regarding PPC or a viral video the SEO company employed, for example). Don’t be shy about writing… A one or two sentence post likely isn’t going to impress! A paragraph or two is probably about right. To protect all claimed perpetrators company names will be edited out of any stories submitted. Deadline? If I’ve got more than 50 repsonses by September 15th, I’ll stop considering entries at midnight. If not, I’ll determine a period of time to extend the entry period. The final deadline for entries is September 22nd at midnight. The winner will be announced on the 23rd! Looking forward to reading your entry!
03 Sep This post is from from my other blog here When I blogged my thoughts on Google’s Chrome browser yesterday I was hoping to find an announcement video to accompany the post. Today there is a Google Chrome announcement video available from YouTube (and shown below). The slide deck used is entitled “Google Chrome - A New Take On The Browser.” This is the product announcement that was made just prior to making the browser available for download on the Google Chrome web site.
02 Sep This post is from from my other blog here There’s a lot more going on over at Google than them wanting to restart the browser wars. Google’s Chrome walks like a browser and talks like a browser, but there’s much more of an agenda than taking browser market share away from Microsoft of Firefox. In my opinion Google sees Chrome as a way to start tying up many loose ends they’ve already put into place that they cannot reliably tidy up without a browsing client of their own. There’s two things that are front of mind: cloud computing and social networking. Cloud Computing Scott McNeally is likely somewhere in a padded room cursing the visions of the future he had in the 90’s. McNeally told us “The Network [was] the Computer.” Thin client and distributed computing was a good call, it was just ten or so years too early. At the time McNeally was thinking about it, broadband wasn’t prevalent, and web browsers barely spoke the same language. Times have changed, and both issues have largely evaporated. Things evolved and a similar message is back: the Web is the operating system. Add to the mix that the general populous is shedding their shyness about sharing personal information (and general concerns about privacy) and McNeally’s time has come. Google? Google is well invested in the cloud computing landscape. A quick review of their business productivity initiatives online makes that clear: they’ve basically built Microsoft Office as a web-based solution. Google’s Outlook is GMail and Google Calendar. Google’s Word, Excel and PowerPoint are known as Google Docs. And, Office-type business applications are just a few of the web-based applications Google has put in the cloud (for free). They also have Google Notebook for organizing information found on the web, Google Sites to create web sites and secure wikis (collaboration), and they are at the forefront of online photography and video sharing with Picassa and YouTube. So, you’re probably asking “what does that have to do with a web browser.” Well, without controlling the web browser itself, these applications are (or I would argue will likely be) disjointed in feel to the end user. And, their capabilities are stuck within the limitations provide by the user’s web browser of choice. What could be gained by owning the browser they run in? The disconnected experience for one. Cloud Computing sounds great, but the experience to the end-user needs to be seamless and smooth, and, it needs to work when the user is not on the Internet for wide adoption. Chrome utilizes the Google Gears runtime. Gears is an open-source project which “let[s] web applications interact naturally with your desktop.” That is from the Google Gears home page. It also mentions that you can store data locally. That would allow utilization of Google applications (and what is created with them) when not connected to “the cloud.” Gears allows it, but how that experience translates to the user is where Chrome will shine. It’s something the other browser companies don’t have front-of-mind, nor do they have reason to. What if you were using ...
01 Sep This post is from from my other blog here Today Google announced that they’re releasing an open-source web browser. Called Chrome, the browser will be launched in beta format (what else would we expect from Google) tomorrow. Why is Google creating their own web browser? In the blog posting their reason is that they “believe [they] can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.” The post continues and provides a broader context for Chrome: All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build. On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go. If you run Windows, you’re in luck. You’ll be able to try out Google Chrome tomorrow. If you’re running OS X or Linux you’ll have to wait, those versions of the new web browser aren’t being released at this time (but are under development). The Windows version should be available when Google switches on the Chrome web site at this URL: http://gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en (it currently redirects to Google’s homepage). There’s far more to Chrome than a new web browser coming to market to challenge Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Chrome will undoubtedly tie into several other Google initiatives with Open Social at the top of the list. Chrome also creates a new venue for Google Gears applications, as the open-source local runtime will be built into the browser. In addition to the blog posting Google also posted a link to a comic book on Google Chrome. Feel free to craft a clever joke regarding the comic book angle and send it to me, my creativity is still enjoying Labor Day. Read the entire Google Chrome Announcement. If you’re interested in the current browser landscape, there’s a great article over on cnet news.
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Later this morning it’s rumored that the HTC Dream running Google’s Android operating system will be unveiled. Most of the conversation about Android is grounded in comparisons to Apple’s iPhone which ushered in new thinking about the potential of geographically aware personal mobile devices.