Category: Search

Should I purchase domain names proactively?
This past week, The Donald made headlines when it was uncovered that his company owned thousands of domain names that are simply being parked in what it deems as a defensive move.

Says Trump’s son, Eric, “For a company like ours, it’s incredibly important to protect ourselves, and it’s incredibly important to own our intellectual property.”

Here’s why this doesn’t make financial sense, and why it also a futile effort:

Yahoo lists some of the domains owned:
- DonaldTrumpSucks.com
- TrumpCorporationSucks.com
- TrumpOrganizationSucks.com
It typically costs anywhere from a few dollars to about $15 to keep each domain per year. Let’s say it’s $10. And let’s say they have 50,000 domains. That means they are paying $500,000 a year to park these domains. Chump change for a billion-dollar corporation, right? Well, after 20 years, that’s $10 million. Not to mention the lost return on capital the $500,000 would generate on a annualized basis.

The Trump organization is probably also (over)paying an agency to manage these domains on their behalf… perhaps another $50,000 – $100,000 per year.

When asked, I have never recommended purchasing domain names to thwart potential slander. And I’m asked this same question at each company I work. The reason is pretty simple, you just cannot purchase all the combinations of potentially scandalous domain names. In fact, there are 36 to 245th power which is basically a 2 with 381 zeroes following it. That’s a lot more than a google, and a lot of $10 bills each year. For example, here are five domain names I could purchase that they haven’t yet:
- DonaldTrumpSucks1.com
- DonaldTrumpSucks123.com
- DonaldTrumpSucksABC.com
- DonaldTrumpSucksNYC2016HellYeahEveryone.com
- DonaldTrumpSucks3000.info
See my point?

Not only is this a waste of money, it’s a waste of time.

Proponents of this futile activity will claim “it’s worth it if we even thwart one attack!” But you won’t. If you know search engine optimization, you don’t even need Trump in the name of your website to talk about the organization. I’m talking about them now, and if I had good content and SEO, then I won’t need a Trump-specific domain name to spread my word.

And, let’s say you are slandered, if another person is using your trademark and/or slandering you, there’s a really good chance you can shut them down through the legal system – and it’s typically not a big company fighting you, but an individual that lacks sufficient legal resources to counter attack.

So save some time and a lot of money and stop buying domains you don’t need.
How-to start up an international search marketing campaign
If you’re thinking about taking your search marketing to the international markets, my first word of caution is that what works in the USA does not necessarily translate to success overseas. There are a number of reasons for this – different types of technology (international markets may be more mobile dependent or have lower bandwidth); new competitors in the decision set; varying consumer sentiment; and so on.

So my next piece of advice is to make sure you are really good at local search. If you don’t have that locked down, reconsider going international until you do. International search simply introduces lots of complexity that you shouldn’t try to tackle until you’ve mastered search in your own back yard.

Still ready? Here are five pointers to consider:
1. Local domains for your search ad copy and landing pages. Dave Lloyd over at Adobe penned a great article for ClickZ on the topic. Simply put, make sure your ads have a local domain extension. So if you are advertising in the UK, make sure you have a UK-familiar URL, such as myLandingPage.co.uk or similar. You can always have the funnel ultimate redirect back to your main .com; even better, to your main .com with a local directory such as myWebSite.com/uk.
2. Have a dedicated landing page for the specific market. So using the UK example, you should have a special landing page that has the region in the meta data, header tags and body copy so that the machines, search engines and humans interacting with your landing page know without a doubt you are providing an offer to people in the UK. Make sure your headlines and copy are tailored for the market’s culture and language.
3. Localize your search ads. When you are writing your search ad copy, make sure you use proper language consistent with the market. If you’re speaking to the UK, consider little nuances like “colour” versus “color” or “internationalisation” versus “internationalization”. And be wary of clichés, expressions and humor that might not be understood in the market. Stick to the facts and be very clear/concise in your ad copy. And, certain words have different meanings (even in the same language). Rubber typically means something different on the streets of LA than the streets of London.
4. Display ads should be similarly tailored. Don’t assume that if it worked as a display ad in the USA, it will work elsewhere. That goes for all elements – animation, the type of people and images featured, how they appear and are positioned and even animals — all influence how different cultures interact with advertisements.
5. Understand how locals think. My best quick advice is to start searching for your keywords using overseas search engines (google.co.uk) and see what types of ads your competitors are using. Hit their sites so you get remarketed to and then start browsing local websites to review banner ads. You’ll probably see some immediate differences. You need to understand your audience in the target market and what makes them different from your USA market. This will help you zero in on creating personalized and engaging ads (and landing pages).
And of course with any digital campaign remember the basics:
1. Don’t start until you understand what your objective is.
2. Don’t start until you understand how to measure the results.
3. Test, test, test.
Getting videos watched on YouTube

One of the questions I field regularly is how to improve the visibility of videos on YouTube. The answer is quite simple: start with highly sought after content. It’s not as hard as you think and the secret ingredients are in your web browser’s search history. People generally want two types of videos: entertainment and informational. Everything else is crap and won’t rack up many views. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to ignore entertainment videos. These are music videos, funny home videos, clips from mainstream entertainment and of course, cats. So let’s focus on the other category – informational.

People go to search engines typically looking for answers to their questions. So, make sure your videos provide those answers. How-to videos, informational snippets and overviews of processes all do well. For example, “how to fix a leaky toilet”, “how to test your smoke detector”, “how to solve a square root”, “how to remove wallpaper”, “how to fry an egg”. Get it yet? This is what people want. It’s what people search for. If you have a video like this, when people search, they’ll see a big icon for the video, and be immediately drawn to it. Search engines love videos, because searchers click the videos. As a result, they tend to rank highly and they get more clicks. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy which is the search paradox I’m always discussing.

At American Public University, we took very expensive, Hollywood-style production videos and placed them on YouTube. Sure, some of our prospective students watched them. And they are great videos. They were expensive videos. So they have a few thousand views after a year. We then took some low budget, crudely produced videos on how to solve the most common K-12 math problems like polynomial equations, sine/cosine, adding fractions, etc. These took a few minutes each to produce and cost basically nothing. In the past three years since adding the videos to YouTube, iTunesU, and our site, http://www.CampusMath.com, we’ve had nearly 2,000,000 views of the series. Why? It’s what people want! It’s what students are searching for.

Give people what they want.

Also important is the proper naming, tagging and description of a video. That will help the search engines connect searchers with the videos. It’s easy. Create a short title – about 40 characters or so. Make sure you have a dominate identifying keyword. Then, create a description, no more than about 250 characters. Include more keywords that identify your content. That’s really it. Here’s a good article that goes into more depth with regards to ensuring discoverability of your content.

We’ll leave another important topic to cover on another day – marketing your videos if you are a small business. I have some more tips on that later…
Google’s auto complete, a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Google’s auto complete feature suggests the search words/phrases that most commonly match what you are typing in real time.

For example, if nearly everyone typing “and” end up typing “android”, Google will suggest that through it’s auto complete feature, designed to save you time. It’s also designed to “help” your searching by showing you what the majority of other people typing similar phrases selected.

From Google’s help site:

As you type, autocomplete predicts and displays queries to choose from. The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google. If you’re signed in to your Google Account and have Web History enabled, you might also see search queries from relevant searches that you’ve done in the past. In addition, Google+ profiles can sometimes appear in autocomplete when you search for a person’s name. Apart from the Google+ profiles that may appear, all of the predicted queries that are shown in the drop-down list have been typed previously by Google users or appear on the web.

For certain queries, Google will show separate predictions for just the last few words. Below the word that you’re typing in the search box, you’ll see a smaller drop-down list containing predictions based only on the last words of your query. While each prediction shown in the drop-down list has been typed before by Google users or appears on the web, the combination of your primary text along with the completion may be unique.

But does this really benefit users? Sure, it’s a time saver, but it may also steer people away from less common phrases that may in fact be more accurate.

Source: Google — Sample of auto complete feature for “new…”

Why does that matter?

As more people use auto complete and select the most common results for the suggested phrase, the more Google will continue to show those suggested results, further pushing down the less popular results.

Showing more popular results is part of nearly all search engine algorithms, but if you consistently steer users towards one option over another, that other option will be artificially increased in affinity/popularity.

This could be really bad for a business. Let’s say someone searches for a company and they want to read about negative reviews/scams. So they search for the company’s name + scams. If a few more people do it, it may get picked up by the auto complete algorithm.This means every time someone searches for the company’s name moving forward, “scams” will be suggested until enough people stop clicking that phrase to tell Google otherwise. Wouldn’t a user who otherwise was not looking to read scams be somewhat intrigued to click that suggested term, even if that’s not their original intent? And every click reinforces “scam” as a suggested term. It then becomes harder and harder for a business to reverse this – even if there are no scams or negative reviews to begin with.

This is very similar to the term “google bombing“. Where users can potentially “game” Google’s search algorithm. Albeit, the good folks at Google are always working on improving the algorithm to reduce this, it can still happen.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Google. But, I’d love to see some studies on the psychological and socioeconomic impacts of suggesting terms.
Malware still infiltrating major search engines

I find it challenging to understand why there’s still seemingly minimal innovation in the area of protecting searchers from malware infected websites. This seems to be a no-brainer from my perspective: protect your customers, and they will continue to come back. But I think the problem stems from customer naivety – they don’t know what they clicked will hurt them, and that they were infected because of a link they clicked on from the search results.

The major search engines need to better partner with security companies to protect their customers – and ultimately their revenue source. A simple pre-filter could stop many infiltrations of malware and protect the net.

Read more here about how the latest studies show the major engines failing in this area: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/197972/bing-google-ad-seriously-impacted-by-malware.html
Facebook Click Fraud Issues

In a recent publicized report, thanks to Facebook having to keep its business in more of a public eye due to the company being publicly traded now, we learned that 8.7 percent of Facebook accounts are “fake”, more more than 80 million. We already knew this. Why? Because most Facebook advertisers who know what they are doing have been measuring the performance of their ads and have found that they get billed for more clicks then they really received. And most likely, these clicks are from fake accounts and bots.

In fact, a company called Limited Run reported that 80% of its clicks were from bots!

My own research from clients puts this number at closer to the 1-in-3 or 33% range, still horrendous by any measure. And, that’s based upon about $1.5 million dollars worth of clicks analyzed.

It’s the cost of doing business with Facebook. In other words, if the ROI you are obtaining from your ad campaign is tolerable, then the click fraud is just part of that campaign’s cost. Obviously, we would all love to higher higher ROI (via a lower cost). Facebook is not motivated to put systems in place to do better at weeding out click fraud. Google is much better – having been sued several times into improving. So, maybe its time to start forming a class against Facebook so that advertisers can obtain rebates for these fraudulent clicks. Its to Facebook’s long term sustainability and advantage to not bill clients for these clicks because that lowers client’s campaign ROI – making them less likely to run more campaigns over the long run. So, if Facebook rebates these fraudulent clicks, ROIs go up, costs go down, clients are happier and keep pouring money into Facebook, and in the end Facebook generates more revenue.

Until then however, make sure you allot about 1/3 of your budget to “sunk costs” of click fraud – clicks that will generate no value for your business whatsoever.
Content Marketing – Where to Begin?

One of the better articles I have come across in recent memory on the topic of content marketing was served up recently at SEOMoz.org by Toby Murdock.

Toby outlines how to establish a team, define roles, create standard operating procedures, execute, and measure – all essential elements of creating a powerhouse content marketing strategy (and team).

Check out the article here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-build-and-operate-a-content-marketing-machine
Facebook Revenue Climbs, but Click Fraud Questions Linger

As a Facebook advertiser, I have long seen a substantial discrepancy between what Facebook charges me (the number of clicks) and what my analytics software records as visits to my site.

The obvious issue is whether all clicks of ads result in a “ping” of the analytics code snippet on your site. With the new asynchronous code snippet from Google Analytics and your ability to place the code in the header, fewer visits should result in not being recorded.

The other option is that JavaScript or cookie blocking is in place in the visitor’s browser. However, this is a very limited subset of people who click on advertisements.

However, the gap is substantial – as much as 35% (or even more in some cases) between Facebook’s bill and the analytics program. This begs many customers to ask the question, why is Facebook charging me for clicks that don’t result in a visit to my site?

These clicks provide no value the advertiser. And actually, they don’t provide long term value to Facebook, because it reduces the success of advertising campaigns, turning the advertiser away.

However, Facebook has decided to continue ignoring this issue and raking in huge profits along the way.

Some companies have tried to sue Facebook, with limited success.

At the end of the day, you basically have to bake in this cost (click fraud and invalid clicks) into your campaign as a cost of doing business with Facebook. If, after all is said and billed for, you can still achieve your desired ROI, you’re good to go. Otherwise, I suggest taking your hard earned dollars elsewhere.

I suggest that Facebook up its game in this area and stop billing customers for click-bounces… Clicks that don’t register a hit on the customer’s server. I think a 3-second rule is a good idea – if the visitor isn’t on the advertiser’s site for more than 3 seconds, then they don’t get charged for the ad.
Rosetta Stone Law Suit Against Google Moves Forward

Rosetta Stone (makers of the language software) have been given the go ahead by the appeals courts to move their lawsuit against Google to the next stage of the litigation process – a trial.

Rosetta Stone is asserting that Google is serving up Ads triggered by Rosetta Stone’s trademarks. So, when a user types in “Rosetta Stone”, they are seeing ads for other products, thus confusing the consumer.

I have long advocated to not bid directly on the keyword marks of your competitors. It typically does not generate good conversion results in the B2B area in particularly. It’s also a poor business practice that usually results in the other business countering by bidding on your terms. The end result is a bidding war (and the only entity that wins is Google).

However, this case has further implications on broad match and session match. It’s quite possible that Google will have to block session matching whereby it would normally use your search behavior to serve you ads regardless of what your query is… For instance, if I make three searches about cell phones, and then refine my search to smartphones, I still may see ads triggered by the original “cell phone” key phrase. And broad match may kick in if I type “Nokia smart phone” whereby AdWords matches me to a “Samsung smart phone” ad triggered by the “smart phone” portion of my phrase.

If Google will be required to block all marks except to their owner, there’s a lot of work that will be required. Google will need to build a system to verify ownership of marks to enable advertisers to bid on their own marks; and also build a system that blocks ads from appearing on registered marks in any form (broad, session or otherwise).

One thing is for sure, this case will continue to take its time moving through the legal system. Here are some more details reported by MediaPost.
Facebook Reduces Ad Text from 135 to 90

Recently, Facebook notified its advertisers that new ads would be subject to a 90-character limit while existing ads at the 135-character limit will be grandfathered.

I have read a few articles about this over the past few weeks and most agree that this will be a new challenge for marketers accustomed to the extra room. A decrease of 35% is substantial, and this will be a big deal for advertisers to update their ads moving forward.

These changes do not favor marketers, they favor Facebook’s bottom line. Reducing ad copy and increasing the number of ads reduces an advertisement’s effectiveness. While initially the extra inventory may lower ad prices, at the end of the day, those will be countered by lower CTR and conversion rates for advertisers.