Reuben Yau

Google’s plans to dominate the online advertising world just took another leap forwards today when they announced the acquisition of Doubleclick.

At Google, we are constantly looking for new, innovative ways to make the information you want more accessible and more relevant—and to deliver it as fast as possible.

Once Google gets firmly established in the other major media outlets, TV, Radio, Newspaper, you have to wonder what’s next.

In 2034 will I wake up each morning and listen to my Google clock radio? Will I have ads beamed onto the inside of my shower curtain? When I take a number two, will I have TP with Sponsored Sheets? Will advertisers be billed on a PPR (Pay Per Roll) model?

I really wanted to attend so I could listen first hand to some of the presentations and get the chance to put a few faces to names (and voices). And perhaps along the way I could have reminisced about my apartment on 79th and 1st.

Unfortunately work duties have me tied up a lot these days, so attending conferences has been pushed down the list of priorities.

Fortunately the SEO community does a pretty good job of blogging about the latest trends and techniques in the online marketing world. So thanks to all you attendees and eager bloggers.

What did we do before blogs and RSS feeds existed?

I definitely plan on attending SEW in Columbus, Ohio on May 9th.

Part 1 - Detecting http and https Mode Using Javascript
A while back I came across a scenario where a website (typically an ecommerce site) can serve part of their website in both http and https mode. These sites typically use the same template or footer include file for both browser modes. This causes a security alert popup in the browser because the remote javascript file is called using a http request. While this isn’t a security threat, it could cause some less technically savvy users to be concerned about the site security and perhaps not want to complete the transaction.

Google does offer the webmaster the ability to request the urchin.js file using a https call, which works well, except what we really need, is a way to detect which mode we’re in, then make the appropriate request on the javascript file.

With help from some members on SEORefugee we figured out how it can be done.

Part 2 - Only Obtaining External Referrers
Sunday night I was looking through my Top Content report and realized that after my hack to obtain the full referrer, it’s fairly indiscriminate and will obtain all referrers, both internal and external. While I already knew about this, I guess that night I was tired and grumpy and it just bugged me enough to want to fix it.

The whole point of my hack was to obtain the external referrer, so I came up with some more javascript to detect whether the referrer is internal or external and write out the urchinTracker function accordingly, so it will only record the external referrers.

The Grand Finale
So putting all this together we get this:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.write( '<scr'+'ipt type="text/javascript" src="' );
if( document.location.toString().indexOf( 'https://' ) != -1 ) {
document.write( 'https://ssl' );
} else {
document.write( 'http://www' );
}
document.write( '.google-analytics.com/urchin.js"><\/scr'+'ipt>' );
</script>

<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-XXXXXX-X";
urchinTracker();
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write( '<scr'+'ipt type="text/javascript">' );
if( document.referrer.toString().indexOf( 'www.mywebsite.com' ) ==-1 ) {
document.write( 'urchinTracker(document.referrer);' );
}
document.write( '<\/scr'+'ipt>' );
</script>

Just replace the XXX’s with your Analytics account number and “www.mywebsite.com” with your website.

The lovely DazzlinDonna tagged me for another one of these meme things. Since I’m on lunch right now I guess I’ll throw out 5 reasons quickly.

1. Personal Brand Building - Like many other professional search marketers, I had been lurking in the wings and posting in a rather anonymous fashion. But after attending pubcon in November 2006, I realized that I really needed to start building my personal brand.
2. A Professional Requirement - As a professional SEO with clients who are starting to blog, I also needed more experience with Wordpress and blogging in general. I’ve provided help in everything from blogging platform recommendations, style, theme, category selection, blogging optimization and marketing.
3. Expanding Reach Past Forums - Every now and again, I’ll want to share a little tip or trick I’ve found and blogging enables me to reach more than the regulars on the forums I frequent. For example, my post about the Google Analytics hack has received ~14,000 visitors since its publication mid January.
4. Fun Factor - With all the various widgets, plugins, chicklets, gizmos, thingies and whatsits, you can link to and share all kinds of information which makes blogging a lot more fun than publishing on a plain old website. I really like the fact that I know exactly who has recently been reading my blog with the mybloglog widget.
5. SEO Experiments - The previous version of my website had a page about my modified Volkswagen Beetle along with various Beetle related in and outbound links. Because of that, my related:www.reubenyau.com query shows Beetle related websites. Since changing my overall theme of inbound links and topic, I’m monitoring how long it will take Google to figure out my new link neighborhood. I’m also looking at how link popularity filters through my blog, as well as possible duplicate content issues with the category and archive pages.

Thanks to SoloSEO for setting up another meme tracker.

Here are the next 5 victims:

Randall McCarley
Pierre Far
GaryTheScubaGuy
Mike Blumenthal
Media Lizzy

Google is known for testing out changes within its results across a limited set of datacenters every now and then. It looks like they’re testing the color scheme again in the datacenter (209.85.165.104) which is serving my network.

Here’s a screenshot of the sponsored links in yellow:

Edit: Here’s the official announcement from the Inside AdWords crew.

Obviously an April fools joke… I mean look at all the references to known SEO/marketing people…

scbl - Robert Scoble?
davenator - David Naylor?
RandomFish - Randfish?
Z-man - G man?
Shchoeoe+npMMo - Shoemoney?

You need to do better than that Matt :)

Here’s a screenshot for prosperity:

Working for an online marketing agency, we, and I’m assuming most other agencies and corporations, develop internal databases to track and report on pay per click traffic and costs. The various pay per click platforms provide us with the ability to download reports in various formats, which we can import into our own databases easily. We write scripts, macros and various tools to automate the process of generating monthly reports for our clients as much as possible.

So it pains me to no end when I find out that yet again, one of the platforms changes their CSV formatting.

WHY DO YOU KEEP TORTURING US LIKE THAT?

Do you not realize that changing just one character in a field name means that pretty much the entire SEM agency industry, as well as medium to large corporations now need to edit their internal reporting mechanisms?

Here’s a very common theory I come across all the time: “If I have great organic rankings, I can save money by turning off pay per click listings for the same terms”.

This reasoning is only valid if you’re bidding on keywords with poor ROI, or your campaigns are not properly optimized. The one thing that people often overlook is that if you’re paying $100 to get $5000 in business and you’re making say $500 profit, why would you cut that? By cutting advertising with a positive ROI, you’re actually hurting your revenue and profit!

Math aside, here are a few more reasons why it’s good to buy sponsored listings, even if you rank number 1 for a specific term.

1) You are showing the audience that you are serious about acquiring traffic - it shows that you have a strong selling intent.

2) It implies market dominance

3) You provide 2 places (sometimes 3 on Yahoo) where a user can find a link to your website

4) You eliminate one of the sites you’re competing with

5) It caters to both sets of audiences, those who prefer organic, and those who prefer sponsored listings

6) It enables you to use the PPC ad copy to compliment your organic listing, by promoting special offers, trust, or unique selling points

7) Even if your PPC ROI breaks even, you’ve just acquired another customer and increased your marketshare

Edit (3/28/07):
A recent post by Rob Garner of Search Insider: Yes, Co-managed PPC And SEO Campaigns Work also backs up my experiences and proves that this strategy can work very well.

When appearing in both natural and paid search for the same keyword impression, clicks lifted 92 percent, actions lifted 45percent, orders lifted 45 percent, page views lifted 44 percent, visitors increased by 41 percent, and time on site increased by 40 percent.

The results of an iCrossing study found that organic listings actually boost the performance of PPC campaigns significantly, which really emphasizes the point that when you have both an organic and PPC listing on one page, the PPC better have positive ROI.

More Thoughts:

• Mixing Organic SEO and Pay Per Click Marketing by Aaron Wall
• PPC & Organic SEO by Intrapromote
• PPC VS Orqanic SEO by ebrandmarketing.com
• PPC vs Organic Ranks Thread on Seochat.com
• How Paid SEM Helps Organic Search Optimization by Clickz
• PPC VS Organic Search Thread on Searchengineforums.com
• Organic SEO vs. PPC Advertising by WebProNews

Since the recent Quality Score updates have been put in place a lot of people are seeing keywords being marked as inactive for search with a message: “increase quality or bid $X to activate” The costs to activate the keyword vary but can easily be $1, $5 or $10 per click. These costs are just not feasible for most advertisers, but getting these keywords back online is important.

Here’s my 5 step process for getting those keywords active again at the same or almost the same cost.

1) Delete the affected inactive keyword from the Ad Group.

2) Create a new Ad Group and name it something relevant to the keyword you’re working with.

3) Create a new ad which specifically targets that keyword. If you can include it in the title and description, great! If not, at least the title should be good enough. Make sure that the destination page also has that keyword present on the page if possible. If it’s an important enough keyword think about creating a dedicated landing page.

4) Add this keyword and only very close variants to the new Ad Group. For example, if the keyword you’re working with is red widget, only add phrases like red widget and red widgets. We want to keep this as focussed as possible for now, we can always add other variants later. Also be sure to add the necessary negative keywords.

5) Set the CPC way above what you’d normally bid and let it gain a few clicks, then you can back it down to the usual cost. This will give it some history and help get it established.

If your account is poorly structured, you may have a lot of inactive keywords. If this is the case, perhaps this would be a good time to hire a pay per click consultant to help you restructure the account. They should also be able to help you with writing the ad copy, analyzing the destination page and help with conversion analysis.

I’m very glad this Pay Per Action (PPA) beta test is now available and it’s definitely a smart move by Google to fill in the gap of their advertiser base. It will be running on the US content network only initially with limited ad formats, but I’m sure that will expand and grow as more advertisers sign up and publishers request more formats.

The Problem With Current Content Targeting
Many advertisers turn off content targeting (I hate that it’s turned on by default when you create a campaign) because they get poor performance and high clicks costs. It makes it doubly hard when a new or inexperienced AdWords customer wants to try the content network because it very often requires a different strategy to make it successful and when the first taste of results is sour, it’s tough to lure them back in to try it again.

Reacquiring Advertisers
PPA will provide another advertising option for those AdWords clients who opted out due to poor returns and high costs. This will be on their financial terms and is much easier for them to justify and track.

Gaining New Advertisers
There are still many companies who do not and will not trust CPC advertising, or Google’s click fraud protection, due to the huge discrepancies in reported click fraud which runs anywhere from 2% to 20%, and especially when just a year ago Google was involved in a class action lawsuit where they agreed to pay $90M settlement.

Many have misconceived ideas and notions of how CPC advertising works and will not be swayed, regardless of the numbers presented to them. For these business owners, Pay Per Action is going to be much easier for them to digest and they’ll be much more willing to give it a try. Unfortunately, these are the type of people that will really need a helping hand, since they will typically be the most inexperienced at online marketing. The biggest incentives for them will be the lack of financial commitment and easy of applying their business model.

It’s A Double Sell
One of the other issues that PPA advertisers will face is the double sell. They will obviously have to craft ads in various formats with great marketing messages to appeal to the end consumer, but they will also need to ensure that they write appealing descriptions and have a website which appears to convert well enough to have publishers run their ads.

Bye Bye MFA
If this ends up replacing the current CPC model, it will virtually eliminate Made For AdSense (MFA) websites and click fraud because the payback is on the completion of an action (newsletter signup, lead, sale etc). This is a huge step forwards and while many part time webmasters will boo and hiss at this, it will appease the more important audience, the advertisers themselves, ie the source of the revenue. This could also have performance and storage implications for crawling and the indexing processes.

Unfortunately since a lot of Google’s revenue comes from content network CPC ads, they’re going to be extremely cautious at making this type of move.

The Poor Publisher
A lot of publishers will not like this model and will probably stay away from it. Their belief is that simply displaying the ads is providing value and they would like some compensation. While that’s a fair statement in itself, the MFA sites abuse this and tarnish the reputation of good, trustworthy publishers.

In a PPA or CPA model, the advertiser/vendor relationship is self regulating. If a publisher does not see good returns, they will simply swap out the ads.

Competing With Affiliate Networks
The PPA model, (a.k.a. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)) is competing with the affiliate networks like Commission Junction, and they’re not going to like it at all. With Google’s offering, there’s no monthly service fee, which is much friendlier to the vendor. According to Andy Beal’s post where he questioned Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google’s advertising products, Kniaz did not feel that this was direct competition. Although they may not intend that to to be so, the similarities are striking.

More Coverage
Official Google Announcement: Pay-per-action beta test
SEORefugee: Overcoming Objections for Google’s Pay-Per-Action
SearchEngineLand: Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads
Barrons: Google Launches “Pay-Per-Action” Ad Beta