february 2009

I’m giving a webinar on online marketing for the Travel & Tourism industry in a few weeks.

What’s it going to be about?  Here’s what the PR people crafted

Tested Strategies to Boost Online Marketing Success.

Webinar: March 11, 2009 - 1pm EST

In these economic times where industries like travel and tourism have felt the impact of change in consumer behavior, there’s never been a better, more important time for a marketer to leverage online marketing. Resist the urge to pull back on marketing during these uncertain times.

In this webinar, Scott McAndrew, Director of Strategy for Terralever will show you what tourism marketers can do online to cut through the clutter and build brand, lift web traffic, drive conversions and grow market share affordably and effectively.

Presenter: Scott McAndrew, Director of Strategy, Terralever

As Director of Strategy for leading internet marketing and strategy firm, Terralever Scott McAndrew works with clients that include Red Bull, Microsoft, Scottsdale Convention & Visitors Bureau and MiiAmo Spa. Through his long career in online marketing, he’s witnessed firsthand the evolution of the industry and how marketers today can leverage the many opportunities it presents.

Terralever Webinar - Accountable Online Marketing for Travel & Tourism

Topics include:

• What’s really possible with search engine marketing
• What local search is and why it’s so important
• Best practices for increasing the effectiveness of your email marketing
• Effective ways to participate in social media
• Why so many online marketing initiatives are set up to fail before they start

The latest Twitter spam: “ScobleizerA” pushing “Google’s Money Tree.” Of course, it’s not Scoble.  Not even close.

I sincerely hope Twitter finds ways to combat the Twitter Spam trend.

Apparently there’s a fleet of Scobleizer’s on Twitter beyond ScobleizerA. There’s ScobleizerB, ScobleizerC, ScobleizerD, ScobleizerE, ScobleizerF, ScobleizerG…

Google has made no secret about its feelings towards paid link building, openly attacking the practice and going so far as to set up mechanisms to allow individuals to ‘out’ those using the tactic.  Apparently Google’s Japan didn’t get the memo.

In the promotion of a new site feature, Google Japan was spamming its own index by using a well known pay-per-post company called CyberBuzz.

Google Japan did make mention of their marketing practices and violation of Google’s search guidelines in doing so on the Google Japan blog.

Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.

That’s where the story sounded like it would end, but CyberBuzz then followed up by saying that they are not a pay-per-post company and that allegations otherwise are false.

While its possible there may be a misunderstanding, Google once again pointed the finger at… Google.  Viewing the cached version of CyberBuzz’s FAQ’s showed that they had changed as the pay-per-post allegations surfaced.   What went missing from CyberBuzz’s pages?  According to a Japanese blogger, it was the following:

Q: How much money can we get as a reward? A: From a couple hundred yen to thousands of yen ($1-$100 USD) depending on the campaign and your Buzz-level (akky: like karma points)

Q: What do I have to do to get a reward?

A: (snip) Registered members are paid when they write up a blog entry related to the product/service.

I came across this on the Asiajin blog. Start reading here, then follow the related posts: Asiajin - Google Japan Buys Dirty Pay-per-Post Links.

Techcrunch, CNet, and WebProNews also have good coverage.

Analytics is a no-brainer. For any marketing program I work on, getting analytics setup, and setup right, is a prerequisite. Well, apparently that puts me into one of two classes of marketers: those who use analytics and those who don’t.

Surprisingly, my group is the smaller, not larger one.

A recent study by Alterian reveals that less than half of professional marketers use analtyics to measure their campaigns.  Is employing analytics really all that difficult?  Apparently it is.  A press release regarding the study noted that nearly a third “…of those surveyed cite analyzing results as the hardest part of any campaign.”

Not only is apathy for performance measurement en vogue, how a website fits into the marketing mix is askew:

One-fifth of respondents claimed that their website was only ‘basic’ and not at the core of its marketing activity, but with increased investment predicted in online marketing channels, companies need to better understand the importance of the website in effectively underpinning its online presence.  This demonstrates a need for companies to better understand the channels available to them before investing their marketing funds.

Time to back up and get the basics in check, especially in a time when every marketing dollar counts.

I’m preparing an online marketing webinar focused on the travel & tourism industry that I’ll be delivering in March. If there’s something you’d like me to cover, let me know.

If you’ve ever done a local search on Google the results that appeared on the map generally give the impression that Google doesn’t have much local data to share.  In reality, there’s plenty of data there, its just that Google Maps limits the number of markers on the map to the number of search results it is showing at that time.  When (if) the user clicks to the next page of results, voila, a different set of markers appears.  Well, that’s the way it used to work.

Now Google Maps is returning far more markers for local results.

To be clear, I’m talking about mapped search results in Google Maps, not the small map and three or ten listings that accompany searches with local results when performing a traditional Google search (although you can click-through from a traditional Google search to see the same effect).

Here’s how it works (from Google’s Lat Long Blog):

Instead of just plotting the first page of business results on our map, we plot more of them as small circles. You can click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top ten results will still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map.

Here’s an example search on Google Maps:  Apartment in Phoenix.

This is a good change for the end-user.  As it was before, the user would only be seeing the markers for A-J, not all the small red dots (which represent subsequent items on subsequent search results listing pages).  From an end-user perspective, if someone needs to find an apartment (as in this example) the spatial context is likely far more relevant than Google’s algorithmic ranking.

Read the post on Google’s Lat Long Blog: 1000 is the new 10.

iPhone touting Google Analytics addict? There’s an iPhone App for you.  Actually, there are three, but only one that you’ll want if you’re an online marketer.  Bypass the others and go straight for Analytics App.  It’s the priciest one I’ve tried at $5.99, but its worth every penny.

Also works on the iPod Touch. Get the App by visiting the iTunes App store.  Learn more at AnalyticsApp.com.

I recently wrote on how you can easily use Yahoo Site Explorer to learn what websites link to your site. And, in a subsequent post I covered brand reputation management (or monitoring) using Google Alerts. Today’s post combines elements of each of those posts to provide another method of monitoring links to your website, this time using Google Alerts.

If you haven’t read my first post on Google Alerts and you’re not familiar with the tool, you’ll want to start by reading that post.  Assuming you’ve used Google Alerts before, you just need to be aware of a few things to start using Alerts to monitor what sites link to your website.

The method uses a well known variant of Google’s traditional keyword search: the ability to place “link:” before a URL in a standard Google search query to learn what sites Google credits with linking to another website.  Here’s an example of what sites Google recognizes as sites linking to this website (the Google Search launches in a new window): link:http://www.onlinemarketingperformance.com.

Now, all we need to do is use that exact same method and setup a Google Alert which will notify us when it finds a link to our site.  Here’s what that looks like:

Am I that unpopular?

Wait, we’re not done yet.  Let’s back up a step and look at what Google returned for the number of links to my site.

Google reported that there’s approximately 31 links to my site. That’s a bit disheartening. I know there are more than that. What gives? First, it’s widely accepted that Google does not accurately report how many links it is aware of. I’m not going to debate that point or pontificate why that might be. However, the obvious thing to do (to me) would be to just see where Google notes it has seen my URL posted. I’d imagine that more often than not there would also be a link to my site.

Mentions of my URL seem as though they’d be accompanied by links

Let’s try a standard Google search on my domain.  I’m going to also remove the “http://” and the “www.” as I’m not sure how others might represent my URL.  So, my search would be for “onlinemarketingperformance.com” (with the quotes-without them Google will return partial matches, even with spaces and dashes).  Here’s that result:

This time Google says there are almost a thousand mentions of my domain name.  And, by clicking through and reviewing the results, it’s clear a strong majority of those mentions also provide a link to my website.

So, I’ll add that search as another Google Alert.  Here’s my final link (and URL mention) monitoring with Google Alerts:

That’s it.  I’m all setup to monitor links to my site.  Of course, I’ll occasionally be alerted when there is a mention of my URL that doesn’t have a link, but that’s fine.  I’d prefer to know than not know.

Jobless claims are on the rise, housing foreclosures are spiraling out of control and our government is at odds about what to do to straighten things out.  In times like these, companies often find themselves paralyzed, trying to guess how consumers will react, and more importantly where dollars will be spent.  How can search engines help us make some rational, informed online marketing decisions?

In the book The Search author John Battelle describes Google as “a database of intentions.” If you prescribe to that classification, the Google tools I’m going to employ will provide some interesting insight into shopper intentions and how that information can be leveraged.  The first tool I’m going to use is Google Insights for Search.  Insights for Search is another Google Experiment, this time one that allows one to peer inside the volume of keyword (or phrase) searches over time and geographical regions.  Let’s see what we can learn.

What can Google tell us about Valentine’s Day shopping?

Our hypothesis will be that people are still shopping online, but they’re likely looking to get a bargain.  The hypothesis ins’t a stroke of genius, but the devil is in the details.  If we’re going to launch a campaign or put some copy on our homepage regarding our holiday deals, let’s use words that resonate with online shoppers.  Further, since we’re theoretically doing this exercise the week before the holiday, Pay-per-Click is a definite medium we would target.  We’d want to know not only what keywords we might want to focus on for our ads to display, but also what keywords to place in generalized ads to get Internet searcher’s attention.

Let’s take a look at the frequency of terms being searched upon in the United States over the past couple of years using Insights for Search.  The search phrases I’m going to take a look at are:

• Valentine’s Day
• Valentine’s Day roses
• Cheap Valentine’s Day gift
• Valentine’s Day specials
• Valentine’s deals
• Valentine’s discount

Search volume for “Valentine’s Day”

Let’s start by looking up a generalized term about the holiday to use as a baseline for interest overall around the topic over time.  The graph below shows search volume for “Valentine’s Day” from January of 2007 until February of 2009 in the United States.  To be sure we’re focused on shopping, we’ve restricted our inquiry to the “Shopping” category.   The February ‘09 data for this year, term and region is reported to the current week, but we’ll focus on the week before the holiday for all of our analysis.

• 2007: 60
• 2008: 48
• 2009: 53

Before we move forward, let’s be clear about what these numbers mean. The numbers on the graph do not allow us to understand the total number of searches for this term in the United States. I’ll let Google tell you what the numbers mean as opposed to paraphrasing:

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t ...

If you’ve never heard of Google Alerts before you’re in for a treat.  Alerts is another in the stable of Google Experiments which wear the “beta” badge well into their useful lifespan.  I use Google Alerts to monitor brands that I work with for both reputation management as well as to get the general pulse of a brand’s industry.  It’s simple to setup and once an Alert has been created Google does all the work, scanning the web and providing me with information I’d otherwise have to manually search for.

Alerts searches just about anything you can think of on the web including News, Video, Blogs, and of course its massive index of the web.

You can setup Google Alerts with or without being logged in to Google.  I suggest that you do it when logged into Google as management of your Alerts is far easier.  So, step zero is to login to Google Alerts; let’s assume you’ve done that.  If you have no Alerts, this is what you’ll see… a blank slate:

Monitoring brand mentions with Google Alerts

1. The text says it all, You don’t have any Google Alerts.  Try creating one.  Go ahead and click on “creating one.”
2. I’m going to set these up to monitor mentions of Terralever, so I’ll put “Terralever” in for the “Search terms” column.  Unless you want to monitor Terralever, go ahead an enter a brand or term you’re interested in.
3. For “type” I want to know everything, so I’ll leave it set to “Comprehensive” so it will check all sources.  Single options include “News,” “Blogs,” “Web,” “Video,” and “Groups.”
4. I am going to have Google email me as soon as it has something to report, so for the next two settings I’m selecting “Email” for “Deliver to” and “How often” to “as-it-happens.”
5. Finally, click the “Create Alert” button and our work is done.  This is what you should see:

Using the same technique above you can monitor mentions of a brand, its competitors, products, industry terms… anything you want to monitor.

Before you create an army of Alerts, realize that there’s a lot of information out there and it is entirely possible to get pummeled with Alert notifications.  Depending upon how many brands I’m working with and how many keywords I’m monitoring I might receive an unruly number of emails a day from Google.  You can make it manageable, however.

Preventing Google Alert Overload

1. One is to set the delivery to “Feed.”  When you go that route Google provides a link to the feed so you can subscribe to it with a feed reader.
2. Another option is to set the delivery frequency to “daily” so for each Alert you receive a daily summary.
3. You should also ensure that the terms you are receiving Alerts on aren’t too general.
4. One last option is to create a rule in your email client to route all emails that come from Google Alerts to a specific folder.

Enjoy!

If you use the Internet for any kind of online research, you’ve probably found yourself wishing there was a better way to catalog the information you come across.   If so, Yahoo might have a tool for you.  It’s called Search Pad.  From the Yahoo press release:

You’re doing research online – writing a paper on global warming, buying a new washing machine, planning a trip to Thailand, or trying to understand a health condition. You visit a few related websites when suddenly your search engine asks you if you’d like to start taking notes.

Introducing Search Pad, a new feature we’re testing on Yahoo! Search that helps you keep track of websites and take notes whenever you do research online. It intelligently understands when you’re in research mode and, if you choose, collects information about the sites you visit. You can create research documents with saved websites, edit and reorder your personal notes, and share them with friends. No more handwritten scrawls, Post-Its or scattered documents. And you can access them from wherever you are.

I’ve tried a few other tools like this and for one reason or another and for whatever reason the work flow just didn’t click for me.  The user experience with Search Pad looks good, but the true test is actually using it.

Unfortunately I can’t try Search Pad now, it appears to be a close beta program.  It won’t be a long wait, however-Yahoo is quoting a “few months” until Search Pad is publicly available.

Read the full post on the Yahoo Search Blog.

In search engine optimization (SEO) circles its a foregone conclusion that how many websites link to another website play a role in how well that site ranks on search engine result pages (SERPs).  And, of offsite SEO factors influencing how a website ranks, the number and quality of links is at the top of the list.

So, it’s not surprising to me that clients often ask how they can find out what websites link to their site.  Finding out isn’t difficult, and, ironically the best provider are search engines themselves.  Today I’ll cover one free link research tool from Yahoo called Site Explorer.

Yahoo! Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer can provide a few different pieces of information about your site, but we’ll focus on those inbound links.

1. Go to http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
2. At the top of the page, type your website address in and click the Explore URL button. Site Explorer will return a list of links, but this isn’t the list of links that we’re looking for.  This list is of links within the website address we provided.   Let’s get the results we need.
3. Toward the top of the results there are two options labeled “Pages (247)” and “Inlinks (1,281)” (those numbers will differ for your website).  The default selected option is “Pages,” but we want “Inlinks,” so click the “Inlinks” button. Now you’re seeing a list of websites linking to your site, but we still have one more step.  The list you’re looking it only shows the links pointing to your homepage, and we want to see links that point to any page on your site.
4. To the right of the button you just depressed, there is an option labeled “Show inlinks:” and two sets of options.  In the first drop-down menu, select “Except from this domain” as we don’t want to see how pages on our site link to each other. Once the page refreshes, select “Entire site” from the second drop down.

That’s it.  You should now be looking at a link of websites which link to your site.

Limitations of Site Explorer

Depending upon how many links you have, you might not be able to see all of them with Site Explorer.  The tool currently limits you to the first 1,000 links Site Explorer returns.

Google announced a new version of Google Earth today in a press release.  Following Google’s big head start in cataloging the information on the planet that is above the waterline, a new feature in this latest release “enables users of Google Earth to dive beneath the water surface, explore 3D underwater terrain and browse ocean-related content contributed by leaders in ocean science and advocacy.”

Before you check your calendar, today is February second; this isn’t an April Fool’s Day post.  For a quick overview, watch the video below.

Google also launched several other new features and enhancements including:

• Historical Imagery - Allows viewing older satellite imagery for a given location by dragging a slider.
• Touring - This features allows users to create narrated sequences with Google Earth reminiscent of how Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth are being utilized by the media.
• Google Mars 3D - You guessed it; it’s Mars in 3D.
• GPS Tracking - This feature was previously available only with Plus and Pro versions of Google Earth.  It allows the uploading of tracks from GPS devices to allow visualization of running, hiking and bicycling routes.

Of all the updates, I’m most interested in the Historical Imagery view.  I’m always watching to see what Google is up to when it comes to factoring ‘time’ into the search equation.

Google Earth 5.0 is available as a free download from Google.