Just a word of warning, the local ranking factors change in importance all the time as the engines try to sort through the mountains of data that exist from multiple data sources, business owners and content providers. It’s certainly an interesting field and one worth paying attention to!
The Google Online Marketing Challenge is shaping up to be one of the season’s most anticipated spectator sports for the internet marketing community. Not only is it a great educational opportunity for the next generation of online marketing professionals, but it will help small and medium sized businesses learn more about utilizing Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising as part of their regular marketing mix. Google will undoubtedly come out ahead in the long run as a result of increased awareness and trials of its primary revenue generating operation. It’s a classic win-win-win.
I have already been approached by some friends and relatives in business school that are new to Adwords and PPC consulting that are looking for advice on how to pick the best small-to-medium sized business to partner with. This may be one of the more important decisions they will make, since their level of interaction with their “clients” will largely determine how successful the student “consultants” can be.
That being said, I would consider the following when choosing a business to partner with:
Flexibility: Choose a company that is open to making changes to their website quickly. Some small-to-medium companies don’t have the resources in-house to make rapid changes. This will be important when you have to ask them to add tracking code to the site and/or update various components of their landing pages and conversion pages to improve performance.
Short Purchase Cycle: You will want a company that has a quick turnaround time for conversion events. Think spontaneous purchases or conversions. Don’t go after car dealers, mortgage companies, real estate brokers or insurance companies since those types of transactions can take weeks or months to complete and you will only have 3 weeks. Find something easy. Look for sites that have a lot of opportunities for visitors to turn into customers (e-commerce sites, sites that offer free downloads, sites that try to generate leads for the company). This will give you a lot of conversion data from which you can quickly make decisions about how to optimize your campaign for better-performing keywords, ad text and CPC bids.
Online and Offline Metrics: If you want to go after the holy grail of internet marketing, take the conversion tracking one step farther and try to find a business where you can track customers that go offline to make a purchase. The majority of businesses sell their products or services offline. They don’t have shopping carts on their websites that allow them to easily track conversions automatically. The challenge for many businesses is to determine which part(s) of their marketing programs are actually generating a positive return on investment (ROI). Paid search is a very quantifiable marketing tool but if you can’t measure its contribution to an actual sale, you can’t determine if it is more or less effective than any other marketing channel.
Low-to-Moderate Competition: Certain industries are more exposed to internet marketing than others. For example, your local small business might be competing against much larger, more sophisticated national or international organizations with dedicated search engine marketing teams. Choose wisely. Look for companies that operate within a less competitive environment where you can stand out a little more. Travel, insurance, automotive and healthcare are good examples of highly competitive industries. Not to mention that industries (and keywords) with more competition will generally have higher minimum Cost-Per-Clicks, meaning you won’t be able to afford large enough quantities of clicks to make any statistically significant findings.
Strong Demand: Choose a company or industry that receives enough searches to allow you to collect a significant data sample within the allotted time frame. “Llama farmers in Ann Arbor, MI” might not generate enough impressions and clicks to give you any clear insights about whether your strategies and tactics are working or not.
You may have some trouble finding a willing company that meets all of these criteria, but the more of them you can satisfy, the better chance you will have of generating some valid results within the 3-week contest window.
I came across a great (and very common) question in the LinkedIn Q&A section this morning. I took the time to compose a response and liked it so much that I have pasted it here as well. Enjoy, and feel free to continue the conversation or contribute your thoughts here.
Asked by Jon:
Is it possible to only use online advertising (PPC, banner, e-mail) to support a traditional brick and mortar company? Or would you need a mix of traditional media to be successful?
My answer:
Hi Jon,
It is certainly possible to use online media exclusively to promote your physical locations, but is it the most effective media mix? Probably not. It all depends on your objectives and budget. I will assume that by “support” you mean “raise awareness for and traffic to” the physical location.
With proper planning and execution, traditional media is still the best way to generate awareness (some combination of reach and frequency against your target audience) for a product, service or business. Online marketing is a great complement to offline media in that it can capture the newly “aware” audience when they go online to seek what they need. Here are my thoughts on the online channels you listed, and a final suggestion on how to tie it all together.
PPC is not designed to build brands or raise awareness on a large scale. The advertiser is limited by the content (short text ads) and the context (the ads only appear next for keywords that the consumer explicitly searched for). Given that searchers have an implied intent when they enter keywords into a search bar, PPC is a “must have” for reaching the consumer when they are actively searching for your products or services. In addition to being in the right place at the right time, PPC’s impact is quantifiable.
Banner ads are slightly better at creating awareness by building reach and frequency, but consumers are increasingly suffering from “banner blindness”. Eye tracking studies have shown that over time, internet users learn to avoid banner ads that appear overly commercial and not relevant to the content they are viewing. To combat this, banner ads can be used as a point for interaction by using rich media and/or relevant, useful content rather than simply as a static billboard. Although they are the online equivalent of broadcast media, fragmentation within the online world makes it hard to effectively target your audience on a large scale. Behavioral and contextual targeting technologies are improving, but in my experience banner ads are still relatively inefficient and ineffective when used solely for building awareness and traffic to an offline location.
Email marketing presents different challenges. Namely, you have to have a list of email addresses that have explicitly granted you permission to market to them. Otherwise, you run the risk of violating the CAN-SPAM act of 2003. You can use lists of current or past customers that have opted in to your program, but this would imply that they are already aware of your business. Or, you can rent lists of prospective customers but again, you are limited by the accuracy of the data and the scalability of your campaign.
Of course, there are other online marketing tactics you can utilize (search engine optimization, online classifieds, local search marketing, social media marketing, etc) but the best campaigns are integrated across channels. This makes it easy for your prospective customers to “follow the scent” from the TV, radio or print ad to the internet. Once there, you should position your online media in the places they are most likely to go to find what you have to offer. The fun doesn’t stop there, because you still have to persuade them to visit your website, and because you are an offline business you have the added challenge of convincing them to get up from behind their computer and actually come visit you in the real world.
I hope this introductory overview was helpful. It takes some time to perfect your media mix, but most likely it will be some combination of offline and online strategies and tactics. Remember, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So be sure to establish ways to analyze the results of your efforts against your pre-determined success metrics.
It seems like everybody is making predictions for the search space in 2008 so I thought I would take a moment to make some New Years resolutions related to Search Engine Marketing any my company. If you plan on making any resolutions or setting any new goals for the new year, leave a comment and tell us about it. Or, take the poll and see how you compare to the rest of the community.
1. I will spend more time doing what I know works and less time obsessively reading every piece of rumor, speculation and hearsay within the SEM blog world.
2. I will write more blog entries in an effort to contribute to the community without repeating what others have already said.
3. I will automate and/or outsource more of the repetitive, tedious tasks that take up valuable time and eat into my personal/family life.
4. I will pick a specific area of focus and become a subject matter expert in one (and only one) area of SEM.
One of the most exciting things Google did last year was give business owners access to their listings on Google Maps. The Local Business Center interface makes it easy to add your business to Google’s database or update your existing business listing in Google Maps. Once you verify that you are associated with a particular business, you can add or change all of the information about your company including the address, description, business categories, operating hours, payment methods accepted, the actual placement of the marker in Google Maps, and many other facets. Sounds like a dream come true for small businesses, right? Not exactly. Stay tuned.
Let’s think about what must happen behind the scenes for this to work flawlessly. Google has to aggregate, de-dupe, normalize and filter several large data sets from disparate sources, without a unique, standardized identifier for each business. Navteq provides the maps. Data aggregators like InfoUSA and YellowPages.com compile the business listings. Epinions, Judy’s Book, CitySearch and othes provide reviews. If there is one thing Google excels at, it is exactly this type of data compilation.
So why is the Google Maps Help Group for Business Owners clogged with reports of incorrect information? Business owners that have verified their listings and updated their information frequently find that the data they typed in themselves is no longer appearing correctly in Google Maps, if it appears at all. For any offline business, having the wrong address or phone number suddenly appear in Google Maps can be a crippling turn of events. Compounding this problem is the ridiculously long periods between data updates. Google is only batch updating the Maps and Local Business Center data every 3-4 months. That means that if you find incorrect information about your business it could stay that way for 3-4 months before you have a chance to correct it. There is only one moderator in the Help Group and she is trying her best to keep up with the influx of new questions, requests and confusion/frustration. I get the impression it’s not her full-time job either because of her infrequent, rapid fire posts about known bugs and specific examples of what to do/not to do.
I have experienced this first hand with a client’s 80+ business locations. I created and uploaded a bulk file with each of the listings’ information and sat back to wait. After a couple months the upload seemed to work and our listings appeared in Google Maps….right next to duplicate listings from other data sources, some with incorrect or outdated phone numbers. Additionally, even though I painstakingly added operating hours and other details for each location, that information did not make it into Google Maps, and hasn’t in the 3 updates since.
I could go on all day with examples from the Help Group, but I thought I would turn this into a productive post by offering some suggestions to Google:
1. Don’t over-promise and under-deliver. The Local Business Center can be a very powerful tool for businesses, but only if it works as promised. Currently, the risk of incorrect information showing up in Google Maps might be too high for some bricks and mortar businesses to assume.
2. Provide more help in the Help Group. Maps Guide Jen has been great when she’s available, but it appears that she is not able to address Local Business Center issues on a full time basis. Small business owners that are not very tech savvy are not going to understand the issues behind the problems we’re seeing. They will seek support and expect a response.
3. Fix the bugs faster. My last listing said one of the locations was verified on December 31, 1969. I am pretty good at history…Google was not around the year man landed on the moon. I raised the issue in the Help Group and I’ve been told that it is a known bug and I am unable to update my listings until it is resolved. So, more waiting.
4. Update the data more frequently. I understand it is a monumental task to update all of the Maps databases, and I’m sure you’re working on it. But 3-4 months between pushes is too long when you’re talking about business owners’ livelihoods. Can you imagine what would happen to your business if the Yellow Pages had incorrect information for your business? If you’re not ready for primetime, roll back the Local Business Center and just use the original data sources. At least that way there are fewer issues with duplicate listings, incorrect/missing data and inconsistent information.
5. Get better at de-duping the data. Noboby benefits from 3 duplicate listings in Google Maps search results. Currently it seems that data provided by the business owners are prioritized below other data sources such as InfoUSA and YellowPages.com. Why not trust the business owners more and only use their data when it is available? I see this issue frequently in the Help Group.
The Local Business Center is a big competitive advantage for Google, and they claim to have hundreds of thousands of businesses participating already. Do the cases cited in the Help Group represent just a small percentage of the total Local Business Center listings? Or, are the problems underrepresented because business owners aren’t paying close enough attention and/or not reporting them? Based on my experience, I would assume that there are many, many more problems than we know about.
Hopefully Google resolves these issues sooner rather than later, or stops promising things that are not fully baked. But then again, even though Google ceremoniously took Maps out of beta, it doesn’t mean that it is ready for prime time just yet.
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