Staying Competitive In PPC: Learning From Black Friday’s Most Popular Offers

The five-day Black Friday weekend from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday provided an insightful glimpse into how retailers are running their PPC strategies for the holidays. Particularly interesting are the variety of offer types run by retailers, ranging from the expected free shipping to 2-in-1 offers which include two offers in the same ad.

Since shoppers were expecting to see a retailer’s best deals during that weekend, we wanted to see just how far retailers were willing to go to get the sale.

Using search engine results data gathered by Lighthouse (a partnership between The Search Monitor and comScore) between November 28 and December 2, 2013, on paid ads, we identified the five most common offers as follows:

1. Free Shipping. The offer of Free Shipping, with no minimum spend requirement mentioned, was the most popular offer run by retailers, showing up in 38% of all ads. Shoppers have come to expect free shipping during the holidays, so it was no surprised that this offer would be in the Top 5. It’s important to note that these ads could have brought users to a website that required a minimum spend to receive the free shipping offer, but the ads did not include this language.

2. Sale or Deal. The next most popular offer used by retailers was to include the word “sale.” This appeared in 34% of all PPC ads during Black Friday weekend.  With the Sale offer coming in behind Free Shipping, it was clear that retailers still believe that free shipping provides more perceived value than discounting the price of an item.

3. Free Shipping with Minimum Purchase. After offering a sale, the next most common offer was “Free Shipping” where the retailer included a minimum purchase amount in the ad copy. This more specific, more “forthcoming” version of the Free Shipping offer mentioned above appeared in just 12% of ads. It is obvious that more retailers prefer to omit the requirements of an offer in their ad copy than to display them.

We dug a bit deeper into this offer type to see how the minimum purchase amount differed across retail verticals. The Books, Wholesale, Beauty and Baby verticals averaged the lowest minimum spend requirements, typically between $25 and $50. The Household and Apparel verticals saw the most fluctuation, ranging anywhere from $20 to $125. The other verticals analyzed — Entertainment, Automotive, Party Supplies, Gifts and Floral, Sports and Fitness, Office Supplies, Pharmacy and Hobbies — generally asked for minimum purchases between $49 and $99. Having information like this is essential to ensure that retailers’ ads remain competitive.

4. Free Gift.  Would you click on an ad that promised you a free gift with purchase? A very small handful of retailers (7%, to be exact) employed this offer strategy during the Black Friday weekend. One could argue that the relatively low usage of this offer type represents an opportunity to stand out from other retailers. The real proof, however, will be in the clicks and cost data associated with this approach.

5. 2 Offers in 1 Ad. Rounding out the top five PPC offers run during Black Friday weekend was the offer of both free shipping and a stated dollar discount on the order. Retailers only used this very generous “2-in-1″ offer in just 6% of all weekend ads. Another interesting study could look at which retailers employ this tactic and what click-through rates they receive.

The competitive search marketing data above illustrates the importance of keeping a close eye on both your industry and specific competitors. Only when you know where you stand can you identify how to remain competitive and steal share from another retailer.

How did your PPC offers compare to these findings and how did they perform? Now that you know the most common offers used, how do you plan to change your strategy for the rest of the season?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts on the Black Friday offers and keep an eye out for an update of this chart in January 2014 from The Search Monitor.

WHY YOU NEED VIDEO IN YOUR VACATION RENTAL ADVERTISING STRATEGY

Checklist for mobile website improvement

Unsure where to begin improving your smartphone website? Wondering how to prioritize all the advice? We just published a checklist to help provide an efficient approach to mobile website improvement. Several topics in the checklist link to a relevant business case or study, other topics include a video explaining how to make data from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools actionable during the improvement process. Copied below are shortened sections of the full checklist. Please let us know if there’s more you’d like to see, or if you have additional topics for us to include.

Step 1: Stop frustrating your customers 

• Remove cumbersome extra windows from all mobile user-agents | Google recommendation, Article
  • JavaScript pop-ups that can be difficult to close.
  • Overlays, especially to download apps (instead consider a banner such as iOS 6+ Smart App Banners or equivalent, side navigation, email marketing, etc.).
  • Survey requests prior to task completion.


• Provide device-appropriate functionality
  • Remove features that require plugins or videos not available on a user's device (e.g., Adobe Flash isn't playable on an iPhone or on Android versions 4.1 and higher). |Business case
  • Serve tablet users the desktop version (or if available, the tablet version). | Study
  • Check that full desktop experience is accessible on mobile phones, and if selected, remains in full desktop version for duration of the session (i.e., user isn't required to select "desktop version" after every page load). | Study


• Correct high traffic, poor user-experience mobile pages 
  
  
  
  How to correct high-traffic, poor user-experience mobile pages with data from Google Analytics bounce rate and events (slides)


• Make quick fixes in performance (and continue if behind competition) | Business case



How to make quick fixes in mobile site performance and compare your site to the competition (slides)

To see all topics in “Stop frustrating your customers,” please see the full Checklist for mobile website improvement.

Step 2: Facilitate task completion

• Optimize crawling, indexing, and the searcher experience | Business case 
  
  • Unblock resources (CSS, JavaScript) that are robots.txt disallowed.
  • Implement search-engine best practices given your mobile implementation:
    • Responsive design: Be sure to include CSS @media query.
    • Separate mobile site: Add rel=alternate media and rel=canonical, as well as Vary: User-Agent HTTP Header which helps Google implement Skip Redirect.
    • Dynamic serving: Include Vary: User-Agent HTTP header.
• Optimize popular mobile persona workflows for your site
  
  
  How to optimize popular mobile workflows using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (slides)

Step Three: Convert customers into fans!

• Consider search integration points with mobile apps | Announcement, Information


• Brainstorm new ways to provide value
  • Build for mobile behavior, such as the in-store shopper. | Business case
  • Leverage smartphone GPS, camera, accelerometer.
  • Increase sharing or social behavior. | Business case
  • Consider intuitive/fun tactile functionality with swiping, shaking, tapping.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Google’s Matt Cutts: Link Spamming Google For A Specific Time Period? Then Mass Disavow Those Links.

In a recent video released by Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, Matt answered the question, “How can a site recover from a period of spamming links?”

The example given was when Interflora was penalized by Google for buying links and only was penalized for 11 days. The question was, how can a site with a penalty get their rankings back in 11-days like Interflora?

Matt didn’t give a specific answer to the question, instead he said he wanted to answer it in a general sense.

Matt said that you should disavow the bad links with a vengeance and disavow all the links that might be paid. Don’t use the disavow tool a single link at a time, instead use the domain level disavow option. Matt said this before, explaining that you should use the disavow tool more like a machete.

So, if you know you paid for links between a specific date range, technically, you can disavow all the links you acquired between those date ranges, or at least disavow most of them, at the domain level.

Here is the video:

99 Zingers – Tips That Will Challenge Your Digital Marketing Beliefs

Top Down Viewpoints On SEO & Digital Marketing: Tips 1-20

These tips focus on global perspective when thinking about SEO and its place in your overall digital marketing strategy.

1. Discovery, Relevance, and Importance are still the three basics of SEO.
2. Learn what Google and Bing want you to do, and then do that exceedingly well.
3. Stop worrying about the details of Google’s algo — obsessing about that will only hurt you in the long run.
4. SEO is not a cloak-and-dagger profession, it is a basic part of your marketing plan.
5. If you wouldn’t do it offline, don’t do it online. (Nick Ker)
6. Optimize for business objectives and people first, search engines second. (Ben Fisher)
7. There is no inherent value in the existence of a webpage. (Evan Davis)
8. Remember, it is a webpage, so don’t be a perfectionist. You can update it later.
9. You only have a few seconds to establish who you are, why you have value and what you want the user to do. (Evan Davis)
10. Find the real voice of your business’ personality and use it across all your online marketing and communication efforts. (David Amerland)
11. Create the kind of online presence that resonates with your target audience. Everything else associated with SEO will flow from that. (David Amerland)
12. Embrace usability — this is good SEO.
13. Stop assuming you know what your customer wants. Pick up the phone and ask them. (John Rampton)
14. Implement one-question surveys on the site to gather information about user experience without inconveniencing the user. (Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré)
15. When there is no “first page” to rank on, success will come from those who are really looking for your products and services finding you. (David Amerland)
16. SEO is a tool not a business model. (Claude Pelanne)
17. Always be running experiments. Continually test, retest, and even when you have results, test again. (Ben Fisher)
18. Adapt or be irrelevant. (Jason Darrell)
19. Transitions in process: From Keywords to Concept, From Webpages to Authority, From Links to Endorsements (Cyrus Sheppard via Tom Coleman)
20. Build a brand; that will make every part of SEO (and marketing in general) easier. (Rick Molenaar)

Basic On-Page SEO: Tips 21-33

On-page SEO remains important, but the continuing evolution of Google’s algorithms must prompt us to take a deeper and broader perspective. Out with the tactical and in with the strategic view.

21. Learn the language of your customer — keyword research tools can help you do that!
22. Target the keyword, optimize the intent. (AJ Kohn)
23. Optimize for the click, not the keyword. (Brian Jensen)
24. Keywords: Less is More (Michael Mason)
25. Create a unique title tag for each page. If you can’t, then why does that page exist?
26. Create a unique page for each benefit / usage / intent that your product or service addresses.
27. Myth Busting: No, it does matter if you have an H1 tag. Search engines will place the most weight on the highest level heading tag you use.
28. Search engines associate value with domains and URLs. Don’t change them unless absolutely necessary (even to make them keyword rich)!
29. Site navigation first priority: What links will actually be helpful to the user on that page?
30. Site navigation second priority: Treat internal links as a way to distribute the external link juice your site gets. Use them to tell the search engines what content on your site is the most important.
31. Understand that a key part of SEO is that search engines need our help to better understand your site. This is why schema and other types of markup exist.
32. On-Page SEO Classic: You can do it right, or you can do it over.
33. Leverage your locality by using digital photos, events and interactions as proof of your local relevance and authority. (Jeremy Reivera)

Creating Great Content: Tips 34-50

Without great content, you are probably lost. People so often get confused about the role of content. Here are some zingers to help frame how you should approach it.

34. Be an expert or go home! Or at least, employ an expert.
35. Semantic search rewards authenticity. You really need to find your own audience and your own voice. (David Amerland)
36. Authenticity is hard to fake. (David Amerland)
37. Produce great content, promote yourself effectively and be SEO aware. Know more about your target space than anyone else.
38. Share what you know, share it again (no NOT duplicate content, but the knowledge in different contexts), and then share it one more time.
39. Do what it takes to get your peers to acknowledge you.
40. Strive for extreme differentiation in the content you produce.
41. Don’t be afraid to mention and link to your competition. If you are creating amazing content, it should provide other resources. (Jesse Wojdolo)
42. Better to spend five days producing one epic piece of content than five average pieces that say nothing new or memorable. (Mark Traphagen)
43. Don’t rush. Take 100 steps to create and deliver the best content you can. (Martin Shervington)
44. Adopt an altruistic approach to your content. Content written with the intent of providing significant value to others has the potential to provide a markedly greater SEO value when shared than self serving content. (Warren Chandler)
45. Create content that is: *S*hareable; *E*ngaging; *O*ptimized. (Krithika Rangarajan)
46. Do not hire a random writer and ask them to write that content after spending an hour or so on web research. Just don’t.
47. Don’t hand writers a list of keywords and ask them to write an article using them. Give them a proposed title and then let good writers write good stuff. This will naturally give you semantically rich content of the kind that search engines love.
48. Article spinning = the spiral of death.
49. Learn to use many different types of media and platforms. Your customers are in many different places, and you need to be there too.
50. Give content away for free that everyone thinks you are mad for not selling. (Martin Shervington)

Link Building: Tips 51-69

You could argue that the concept of link building is outdated. I’d argue that only the way it has been traditionally viewed is outdated.

51. Matt Cutts on the phrase link building: “It segments you into a mindset, and people get focused on the wrong things.” (Stated in this 2012 interview.)
52. Matt Cutts on link building: “No, link building is not illegal.” (Stated in this 2013 interview.)
53. Learn how to do link building the way that Google and Bing want you to do it.
54. Links must be valid citations — this is where understanding link building starts, but make sure you truly understand the use of the word “citations” in this context.
55. Links are the result, not the goal. (AJ Kohn)
56. If you don’t know what links your SEO is getting for you, be prepared for your site to get penalized.
57. The dark corners of the web (where “no one” goes) are gone. Assume every link you get will be used to evaluate the quality of your brand.
58. Classic bad phrase: “Link bait”
59. Absorb and understand why it is that Google does not like widget and infographic links — it’s because the creators don’t care where the link goes.
60. Two critical concepts: “Authority” and “Editorial Integrity.” When these are combined, you have found a great place to develop a relationship.
61. Manage the relevance chain in all your link building efforts.

The Link Building Relevance Chain

62. You can’t vote for yourself.
63. Why does Google not like links in Press Releases? Look at the prior zinger.
64. Don’t look natural — be natural.
65. If you can argue that it’s a good link, it’s NOT. Truly good links require no justification.
66. Would you show that link to a potential customer right before they are about to place an order?
67. Myth Busting: .edu and .gov links don’t have any inherent value over other TLDs. They tend to be associated with valuable sites, but the value is in the link profile of those sites, not the TLD itself.
68. Directories: Don’t ever get more than 7 directory links to a site you own… I mean it, don’t do it.
69. Everyone has a weakest link — find your weakest link, and get rid of it. And keep repeating until your link profile is as near perfect as it can be. (Kristi Kellogg)

Content Marketing & Social Media: Tips 70-96

Content marketing is the new king. A good link building strategy is largely, or entirely, content marketing driven.

70. Myth Busting: Social signals do not drive (non-personalized) SEO (yet).
71. However, the influence of social signals on SEO is coming.
72. Strong social media presences are like a built-in PR channel. Build a strong reputation, strong social presences, share great content, and you will get truly natural links flowing in.
73. Relationships with influencers are the great amplifier of all your PR (social media) efforts.
74. Your behavior and interactions in the community define the amount of influence you (or your business) have.

75. The best visibility strategy starts with asking, “How can we help/entertain/inform our audience?” and ends with you getting your ass out there and doing it. (Rae Hoffman)
76. Being truly helpful, solving someone’s problem — that’s engagement that’s memorable. (Mark Traphagen)
77. Content is your brand’s voice — use it wisely. (Alex Valencia)
78. Place your greatest emphasis on content development and marketing. (Gina Fiedel)
79. Build great content and reputation first, and let the links follow from that.
80. The company you keep defines you. Only publish on high authority sites.
81. Follow, engage, form relationships with and share YOUR content with industry influencers and peers. (Jon Dunn)
82. Build real relationships by creating and sharing content that speaks authentically to your target audience on the platform that they prefer for those types of connections. (Craig Fifield)
83. Content amplification begins at the strategy stage, not once it is published. (Jon Dunn)
84. With semantic search we are transitioning from a world driven by rankings in search to a world that’s ruled by visibility. (David Amerland)
85. Everyone talks about engagement being crucial to social media. But not all engagement is equal. (Mark Traphagen)
86. Measure engagement on every piece of content you publish. Use this to drive continuous improvement over time.
87. Think columns, not spreading your guest posts across the maximum number of sites. Columns define authority better than posts across dozens or hundreds of “meh” sites.
88. Showing up in search with Google Authorship is no longer automatic just because you have the markup. You’ve got to stand out and be creating content people share and talk about. (Mark Traphagen)
89. Authorship is not just about rel=author. Google uses it as just one signal to detect who wrote a piece of content.
90. Links are a form of social proof. In the long run social signals will be used as well, but they may not be used in exactly the same way!
91. We become who we spend our time with. In your social media marketing, rub shoulders and interact with some “heavy hitters.” (Mark Sampson)
92. Learn new marketing channels, how SEO could help other marketing channels perform better, and how other marketing channels can help SEO. (Adi R)
93. “The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.” (Eric Schmidt)
94. Ensure that your content answers the 5 Ws & H: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. (Malhar Barai)
95. Rejecting Google+ because the same friends and customers you already have on other social networks aren’t there is hugely missing the point. (Mark Traphagen)
96. Google+ is about extending your reach farther than you’ve ever gone before. (Mark Traphagen)

Last But Not Least: Miscellaneous: Tips 97-99

These are the few tips that did not fit easily into the above categories. Yet, they touch on incredibly important points. The world is going mobile, and it now has to be part of the foundation for any digital marketing plan. In addition, the world is getting smaller. Understanding how to bring your products and services to new countries is critical for many businesses.

97. Design for mobile — get over the resistance and just do it.
98. Mobile: Think tappable, not clickable.
99. Selling outside your borders is harder: make an extra effort to respect other peoples’ culture. (Andrea Scarpetta)

Bonus Tip: Entities Whose Names Change

One issue I learned about in the process of collecting these tips is what happens when women (or men) get married and change their names. While you can tell Google that you have “other names” in your Google Plus profile, it seems that this has not yet been used by them in the search results. The result is that when you change your name, you effectively completely start your Google life over. All your prior history appears to be lost.

This issue was first raised to me by Lisa Heffernan, and then Paul Gailey Albuquerque and Rae Hoffman weighed in on it. Rae wrote an excellent article on this topic in October 2012 called Google Liked it, but They Wouldn’t Put a Ring on it, and I wrote one more recently calledC’Mon Google, Women are Entities Whose Name Might Change.

All of this leads to our bonus tip #100 from Christine DeGraff: “Once you have a chosen name, live with it.”

Wrap Up

Hopefully, you will find some of the above tips useful. The majority of them are about mindset and approach. With all things in life, how you go about doing them counts for a lot! Please feel free to share any “zinger” tips you have in the comments below!

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Search In Pics: Google Drinking Glass, Google Partners Cake & Animated Google Bus Ads

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the Web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Google Drinking Glass:

Source: Google+

Google Partners Cake:

Source: Google+

Google Wallet Card:

Source: Google+

5 Creative Marketing, PR and Social Media Ideas

by Frank Strong

If reading too much can suppress creative thinking, then so too can habit.  Sure, Aristotle saidexcellence is not an act, but a habit, but how easy is it for marketers to fall into a pattern? The same old pattern.

Patterns are predictable and measurable; but they are also avoidable. It is consumer reflex to avoid a pitch. Consider email, for example, which is easy enough to mark as spam.  What would happen if email suddenly was not a tool in the marketer’s toolkit?

I’d suggest that a freak-out session would be followed by a creative session – and perhaps even better and more creative marketing ideas. To that end, here are five creative marketing, PR and social media ideas:

1. Cat videos provide an excellent return on investment

It’s earned 2.1 million views since Toronto-based John Street Advertising uploaded itsCatvertising video to YouTube on November 10, 2011. I had never seen it until it started to make the social media rounds a few weeks back.  It is hilarious!

The video plays on several trends – the shift to digital marketing, the fact there are a lot of cat videos on YouTube and spoofs the Social Media Revolution video Erik Qualman produced several years ago. The video and the results also highlight several other trends in marketing and PR:

• Paid into earned. This is in fact an advertisement for which no payment was made for placement. It’s earning media.
• Capacity to capitalize. It ought to scare PR firms how in some ways, advertising firms are better equipped to capitalize on digital formats; how many PR pros do you know that can product videos?
• Be the media. Advertising as a culture realized and capitalized on the direct-to-consumer trend of digital mediums long ago; perhaps even still have a lead on PR.

2. The fake summer associate

Scotty Larson: Portrait from Scotty Larson on Vimeo.  

Every summer law students apply for “summer associate” positions at law firms.  It’s a path to employment upon graduation and a rather revered rite of passage within law circles.

At Edelson, a 20-attorney shop in Chicago, the partners hired an actor to be an absolutely outrageous summer associate. He’d do things like hire an “out-of-work” attorney to do his work at $20 per hour, and when the actor presumed to be a summer associate turned in that work, the partners would praise the quality.

This didn’t’t last just an hour, or even a day, but went on for a week before the firm revealed the prank in a video to the bona fide summer associates. Businesses compete for talent and this is a great example of building a reputation among candidates as a great place to work.  As reported in the legal trade publication, the ABA Journal:

The idea was to have some fun, but not make summer associates feel that they were a target, and bring the group together by giving them something to talk about after hours, he explained. “We thought it was pretty successful.”

3.  How to honestly create your own index

Honest social experiment by Honest Tea (Photo: Honest Tea’s Twitter stream).

Honest Tea company began a project with unconventional research. According to WTOP, a news radio station in the Washington, DC market:

Earlier this month, the beverage company Honest Tea set up a kind of social experiment to test the honesty of every state in America. In each location the company set up unattended kiosks stocked with chilled bottles of tea. A sign requested $1 per bottle, but it was all on the honor system. Nearby, workers secretly recorded the results.

Alabama and Hawaii topped the charts as most honest states.  DC was deadlast.  The WTOP article offers us another indication as to why.

When Seth Goldman left Dupont Circle following the experiment, he realized his bike had been stolen. “The whole bike was gone, so the lock had to have been cut,” said the Honest Tea CEO. “It was not the best show of honesty for the D.C. area on that day.”

Sorry about the bike… but very creative idea!

4. Smiles to change the world

Coca-Cola is a marketing legend for a reason: it never seems to run out of new ideas.  Adweek wrote:

The typical transaction is that Coke gives you something of obvious value—a free drink or a fun, surprising experience—and that thing makes you happy, sometimes infectiously so. That’s an honest interaction. This new stunt, though—produced and crowdsourced with Victors & Spoils and MOFILM—is different.

Then it cites Coke’s own YouTube description which reads:

We do. Coca-Cola sent our people all over the world, from Jamaica to the United Kingdom to Pakistan and more, to simply smile at strangers — to see who would smile back.

It’s a great video and a good idea.  I think the beverage companies are going to need the goodwill.  It was Adam Singer who seeded the idea with me that the soft drink makers are in a state similar to the tobacco companies in the late 80s or early 90s; the idea is gaining steady steam.

5.  Ads that drive controversy and coverage

I’m a huge fan of using paid media tactics to earn media. The concept is a blend of mediarendered in the form of integrated marketing that drive sales. It’s never been a question about advertising versus PR, but how the two can work together.

The University of Richmond School of Law did just that as the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog reported:

the post-card ad shows a screen shot of an iPhone displaying a snippet of a text message thread between a theoretical law school applicant and a friend.

Add in some controlled controversy – like sophomoric dialogue – and there’s a larger story to be had:

Is the ad really that bad? There’s often a fine line between devil’s and moron’s advocacy, but Law Blog thinks it’s actually kind of brilliant.

Aside from the fact that the Wall Street Journal called an advertisement “brilliant” – which might be celebration enough, the writer explains with a  bit more rigor his thinking:

Yes, the conversation is preposterous, like an alien imitating shorthand text slang. But in a catchy way, it sells the school with compelling data points. Applicants are up. It’s getting more selective. And its graduates are finding jobs. That may be a silly way to make the point, but Richmond drives it home. In that sense, all the attention it’s getting is a good thing.

* * *