Why You Want to Have Good Quality Scores

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If you are advertising on Google it is a good idea to pay close attention to the quality scores within your account.  Within Google AdWords, quality is scored numerically from one to ten and is an approximation of how Google expects certain keywords to perform.
Eligibility – Determines whether your ad is eligible to enter the auction for that query
Position – Determines the relative position of your ad in relation to the other ads on that result page
Price – A better Quality Score reduces the price you need to bid to maintain a given position
Top Slot – Only high quality ads are eligible to appear above the natural search results
Make sure you are paying attention to your keywords clickthrough rate, relevancy and landing pages as all three of these aspects contribute to quality scores. And also keep in mind that higher ad positions, conversion rates and keyword bids do not contribute to quality score calculations.
Read more Google Quality Score Myths and Truths here.

If you are advertising on Google it is a good idea to pay close attention to the quality scores (QS) within your account.  Within Google AdWords, quality is scored numerically from one to ten and is an approximation of how Google expects certain keywords to perform.

  • Eligibility – Quality scores determine whether your ad is eligible to enter the auction for that query
  • Position – Quality scores also help to determine the relative position of your ad in relation to the other ads on that result page
  • Price – A better Quality Score reduces the price you need to bid to maintain a given position
  • Top Slot – Only high quality ads are eligible to appear above the natural search results

Make sure you are paying attention to your keywords clickthrough rate, relevancy and landing pages as all three of these aspects contribute to quality scores. And also keep in mind that higher ad positions, conversion rates and keyword bids do not contribute to quality score calculations.

Read more Google Quality Score Myths and Truths here.

Social Media Brand Series- Who is Watching Your Brand? Part 1

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Social Media- Protecting Your Brand

Kevin Smith

Its a Saturday night, comedian/actor/director Kevin Smith has just boarded his flight on Southwest airlines ready to take flight.  Minutes later Smith, who is a frequent Southwest flyer, is asked to leave the flight due to his weight and escorted off the plane immediately.  Within a matter of minutes, Smith’s experience is shared with his 1.6 million twitter followers and is National news by Sunday morning. The series of events that took place, while an extreme example, show strike fear in businesses across the land.  One of the top brands in any industry, a brand that took a decade to build through strategic PR moves….tarnished in a matter of minutes.

THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA – Who is watching your brand?

Think about all the investments (both time and money) in understanding how the general public views their brand /products / services and neglecting the unbiased opinions being shared online.  In the case of Southwest Airlines, their team was alert and responded immediately on all mediums to Kevin Smith and the 1 million followers they have on Twitter:

“@ThatKevinSmith hey Kevin! I’m so sorry for your experience tonight! Hopefully we can make things right, please follow so we may DM!

Hey folks – trust me, I saw the tweets from @ThatKevinSmith I’ll get all the details and handle accordingly! Thanks for your concerns!

I read every single tweet that comes into this account, and take every tweet seriously. We’ll handle @thatkevinsmith issue asap

I’ve read the tweets all night from @thatkevinsmith – He’ll be getting a call at home from our Customer Relations VP tonight.

@ThatKevinSmith Ok, I’ll be sure to check it out. Hopefully you received our voicemail earlier this evening.

@ThatKevinSmith Again, I’m very sorry for the experience you had tonight. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do.

@ThatKevinSmith We called you on the number you had on file in your reservation. If you prefer a different number, please DM me. Thanks!

Our apology to @ThatKevinSmith and more details regarding the events from last night – https://cot.ag/96KHC7 #Southwest“

Southwest also used their Media site: https://www.swamedia.com/ to issue statements to the general public about the occurrence.  This public response was also followed by private and personal responses to Kevin Smith.  Whether it was the right response, the most important piece was that Southwest was monitoring their Brand and thereby able to react immediately versus having a bigger surprise come Monday morning.

In some of the following posts, we will cover the next steps that occur… damage control!!

Here are some great tools available for monitoring your brand:

BLOG MONITORING:

Technorati: https://technorati.com/

Google Blog Engine: https://blogsearch.google.com/

Blog Digger: https://www.blogdigger.com/index.html

BRAND ALERTS:

How Sociable: https://www.howsociable.com/

Google Alerts: https://www.google.com/alerts


It is All About Mobile

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It’s All About Mobile,
There are 270 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. Ninety-one percent of them keep their phone within three feet of themselves 24 hours a day, 365 days per week.
Thirty-three percent would rather lose their wallet than their phone.
There are 29.1 million smartphone users waiting to be engaged with … marketing. https://www.clickz.com/3635860
As we move forward into 2010 it is important to keep these statistics in mind, as mobile is the medium that stands to change the face of online marketing as we know it.

Make sure your business is setup to do business via mobile devices and feel free to check out our recently launched mobile site.

  1. There are 270 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. Ninety-one percent of them keep their phone within three feet of themselves 24 hours a day, 365 days per week.
  2. Thirty-three percent would rather lose their wallet than their phone.
  3. There are 29.1 million smartphone users waiting to be engaged with … marketing.

Source

As we move forward into 2010 it is important to keep these statistics in mind, as mobile is the medium that stands to change the face of online marketing as we know it.

It Still Only Takes 8 Seconds

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A few months ago we discussed your website and how important it is to make sure your website converts on the traffic that you have fought hard for.  Visitors decide within 8 seconds if they will stay on your site or if they will hit the back button.

  1. Place important information & images above the fold.  Above the fold information is what a user can see without scrolling down the screen.  In addition, users typically scan in an F-shape, looking at information above the fold first.
  2. Is your phone number visible?  Customers may not want to call you right away or even at all, but this information is important to have readily visible.  These policies help customers have peace of mind when shopping or viewing information on your site.
  3. Clean up big blocks of text into easy-to-read statements. Make sure your sites copy is easily readable and keep paragraphs short. Bullets are a great way of sharing a great deal of information, in an easily digested format.
  4. Make sure any links are clearly links and if any text is underlined – make sure it is linked.
  5. Make sure the user can clearly determine what to do next.  Having clear ‘calls to action’ can also help to increase your conversion ratios.
  6. Include your businesses privacy and return policies, web security buttons and any client testimonials you have approval to share.

Get started with Google’s Click to Call

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Google recently rolled out click-to-call within local ads on mobile devices.  This is a feature I love to use within Yelp, when searching for local businesses.  With my iPhone, I am able to search for a business and make the call by simply pressing a hyperlink within the Google ad.  This is an exciting feature that beta users saw a 5-30% increase in CTR’s when rolled out late last year.
To ensure that your campaign and business benefits from click to call you can follow these two easy steps.
1.) Setup local extensions with phone numbers from your local business center account.  This will allow you to set the telephone number that searches see when they look for your business location online.
2.)  Now that you have setup the location extensions, make sure your ads show on mobile phones with full internet browsers.  These are the phones that are able to see these types of ads.
You now have the ability to view performance based on calls and clicks based on advanced filtering options that Google has rolled out.  Keep in mind that your business does not need to have a mobile website to take advantage of this feature, but it is a good idea to have a mobile website in the works as mobile is the wave of the future.

Google recently rolled out click-to-call within local ads on mobile devices. This is a feature I love to use within Yelp, and I’m sure many others like me  – call before they make the trek to your brick and mortar locale.  With my iPhone, I am able to search for a business and make the call by simply pressing a hyperlink within the ad.  This is an exciting feature that Google beta click-to-call advertisers saw a 5-30% increase in CTR’s when rolled out late last year.

To ensure that your campaign and business benefits from click to call you can follow these two easy steps.

1.) Setup local extensions with phone numbers from your local business center account.  This will allow you to set the telephone number that searchers see when they look for your business location online.

2.)  Now that you have setup the location extensions, make sure your ads show on mobile phones with full internet browsers.  These are the phones that are able to see these types of ads.

You now have the ability to view performance based on calls and clicks based on advanced filtering options that Google has rolled out.  Keep in mind that your business does not need to have a mobile website to take advantage of this feature, but it is a good idea to have a mobile website in the works as mobile is the wave of the future.