In today’s real-time brand management world, separate teams often control strategy and channel tactics for SEO, PPC, public relations, online reputation management and social media. In many cases, however, out-of-box thinking and creative silo-breaking to cross traditional boundaries can yield sweet marketing fruit.

Today I’m going to explore the systematic use of paid channels like AdWords and Facebook ads as channels for intervening in quickly moving public relations incidents. Ads can play an important role as powerful tools for supporting the usual tactics of social media and reputation monitoring/management campaigns. I’ll cite real-world transient PPC mashup scenarios for your own brainstorming.

What is a transient public relations event?

Positive and negative short-lived incidents come at businesses in waves, and often require a marketer’s fast attention. Sometimes they’re planned and other times not. Examples include:

• The New York Times features your brand on the front page Sunday morning.
• Your construction project will block a major city street and the public needs information.
• A brand’s rockstar sports-icon spokesperson gets busted for driving under the influence.
• A Mayo clinic researcher announces a breakthrough in the effort to cure breast cancer.
• You just opened a new manufacturing facility, gainfully employing dozens of local citizens with good jobs.
• Your CEO was just invited to a business lunch at the White House.
• The local university’s women’s hockey team just won the NCAA national championship.
• Any event, either abrupt or planned, that falls under the seven classic nodes of public relations.

Just like classic works of literature, these examples of transient public relations events have beginnings, middles and ends. When these pre-scheduled or accidental ephemeral happenings rear their pretty (or ugly) little heads, we must deal with them, maximizing potential benefits and/or minimizing real damage.

When it comes to transient PPC, we start by boiling things down to straight business objectives by asking the following questions about the episode at hand:

• How does the event affect the public’s perception, aligned with or contrary to our brand’s business objectives?
• Is rapid communication required to serve our customers, dispel misunderstandings, celebrate a victory, diffuse anger, communicate crucial information, stake out positioning to preempt an expected response or reap the benefits of something wonderful? In other words does the transient event warrant a response, to our advantage or defense?
• Would instant keyword domination in search engine results (SERPs) by PPC, in Bing, Yahoo and Google, give an edge in propagating our brand’s message? Is PPC appropriate in this instance and can it be executed tastefully to the brand’s advantage?
• If so, what is the appropriate keyword grid? Should the PPC net be cast further than direct brand name searches?
• Where should the traffic go? There are those who believe that PPC traffic should always point to a brand’s website landing page. Sometimes, though, the best path to branding efforts is to vector traffic to public social media profiles, independent publishers, federal agencies, news stories, press releases or other reputable third-party sites that offer independent opinions or validation.
• Would a Facebook ad be tactically useful and fitting? With over 300 million users, certain constituencies are readily accessible to the savvy marketer’s guile via Facebook advertisements.

Implementing a successful transient PPC campaign

Responsible run-and-gun PPC starts with an open mind and pre-planning. Scheduled events, like the corporate charity ball, product release or new vice presidential hire are theoretically easy. Break down traditional big brand barriers and encourage PR, marketing, advertising and event planning stakeholders to organize PPC support ahead of time.

PPC support of “events of the unplanned kind” can originate as part of the normal reputation-monitoring report and react grid. As a general rule, keywords that alert the online reputation management team about positive or negative situations are reasonable candidates for PPC targeting. It’s normal for brands to judge a suitable response to evolving situations.

Here are a few examples of transient events that could warrant a PR response. I’ll break each possible PPC campaign down by trigger event, keyword grid, goal, alternate goal, message, alternate message, destination URL geo-targeting and run length.

Example #1 – Trigger event (unplanned): Mid-authority blogger writes a complimentary article about a brand’s products and links to lead generation page.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, category keywords.
• Goal: Send quiet traffic to reward blogs that support the brand. Garner good will in blog community. Delight bloggers who probably watch analytics and monitor their reputation.
• Alternate goal: Drive secondary traffic from blog post we’re supporting, back to our lead generation page.
• Message: “Introducing the [blogName] blog.”
• Alternate message: Use of the brand name.
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: One week, with a goal of diverting 30% of our normal direct brand searches to this blog.

Example #2 – Trigger event (planned): Brand’s parent company is hiring 45 new full time employees in a community of 65,000 and plans to build a new factory.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, name of city, city services, HR recruitment searches for factory’s skill set.
• Goal: Brand quality of life and company commitment to community, visitors, locals and potential employees.
• Alternate goal: Raise awareness of brand/company to locals plugged in enough to seek out city services by internet search.
• Message: “[Brand], Proud to be a member of our community.”
• Alternate message: “We’re hiring.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: One month – two weeks prior to factory opening and two weeks afterward.

Example #3 – Trigger event (unplanned): Brand product results in a child’s death and a product recall.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, “child’s name,” [cause of death]
• Goal: Reassure the public, clarify what products are affected, and provide vital information for safety.
• Alternate goal: Links for SEO, with a plan for diffusing unflattering keywords from news and other high authority sites.
• Message: Disseminate straight-up information.
• Alternate message: “[Brand] cares and operates in the interest public’s safety first.”
• Geotargeting: Statewide.
• Run length: Indefinite as defined by daily SERPs testing, analytics, buzz, etc.

Example #4 – Trigger event (unplanned): The New York Times features your brand on its front page Sunday morning.

• Keyword grid: Branded terms, keywords customers use to vet the featured product (e.g “[product] review” and “[product] information.”
• Goal: Brand the product/company as worthy of such acclaim, to folks searching specifically for the brand.
• Alternate goal: Secondary traffic.
• Message: “Check out [brand] [product] in yesterday’s New York Times.”
• Alternate message: “[Brand] is notable, legitimate and mainstream.”
• Geotargeting: National.
• Run length: 1-3 weeks.

Paid search campaigns can be a valuable weapon for influencing perception with transient events, which traditionally are associated with public relations. Though not always appropriate, instant prominence via paid listings in SERPs can be a useful arrow in the marketing quiver. To be successful with such campaigns, it’s important to communicate clearly with other departments and pre-plan goals and tactics.

In case you didn’t see it there was an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning that seeks to capture a kind of shift or broadening of advertisers’ attitudes toward search marketing. Formerly search was something of an island and not well integrated into wider marketing campaigns. Many search + display studies and several years later it appears that marketers have developed a somewhat more nuanced view of search in the context of broader consumer behavior.

Here are some bits from the article:

Sprint is buying the top ads tied to phrases consumers tend to search for when they are close to making a purchase, such as “cellphone rate plans” and specific products like “Samsung Reclaim,” rather than more generic phrases they search for at the beginning of the shopping process, like “Sprint,” “AT&T” and “cellphone”  . . .

Volkswagen is coordinating its search marketing strategy with its network of 600 dealers across the country so it doesn’t end up competing against itself for the same terms and driving up prices…

[N]ew research from the search division of GroupM Search (a media buying and planning unit owned by ad holding company WPP) and online measurement firm comScore [ ] shows that consumers exposed to social media campaigns are likelier to search and click on that brand’s paid search ad.

“A few years ago, search was a little bit more progressive. Now, it’s mainstream,” says Simon McPhillips, director of media at Sprint. “The incumbents are trying to figure out, ‘What is the next new frontier?’

None of this is a surprise, nor do the examples above represent incredible sophistication on the part of marketers. It does however represent a widening of the “aperture” around search and search user behavior. As much as it may be driven by economics and not wanting to compete on brand or “generic” terms, which still constitute the majority of search queries, it reflects a better understanding that search queries occur in a larger context — of social media, display, traditional media and word-of-mouth-like viral behavior.

The article also speculates about how such trends are causing some slowing of search-ad spending at Google and how Google is pushing into other areas (display, video) as higher growth opportunities, as a consequence.

It is not uncommon for businesses to find that the relationship they have with their affiliates is one of the most difficult to handle. On the one hand, affiliates can be valuable partners that provide leads and sales for your company. But on the other hand, they are independent entities which require compensation for their services and have their hearts equally divided between your best interest and their own. But if you stop and think about it, this is not an unusual situation: your business probably relies on a number of providers and suppliers with whom it has built a relationship of trust based on mutual dependence.

One of the most common points of conflict is perceived to be the moment when a business is asked to decide whether affiliates—for example, providers of voucher and coupon services or cash back sites—should be allowed to bid on trademark brand words. If they are allowed to do so, consumers entering “M&S” in the search engine, for example, will not only find the link to www.marksandspencer.com displayed on the search page, but also links to a number of websites offering discounts and vouchers for the purchase of Marks and Spencer’s products. If you use affiliates, it is up to you to ensure that your site comes out on top in search rankings, and affiliates are unlikely to bid on your brand so intensely that they knock you out of the top ratings.

If affiliates really are more popular than your company’s own ecommerce site—and they feature higher in the page rankings than the company’s own website—customers searching specifically for your brand are very likely to end up purchasing the product via a website other than your own. The lead gained will then have to be paid for by your company, somewhat reducing its value, even though the consumer would have clicked on your site and not the affiliate’s had the rankings been more favourable.

A burning issue for businesses that have experienced this shift in attribution of sales leads: are the high-ranking affiliates cannibalising sales or is it simply a case of improving the traffic to the brand’s own ecommerce site? Improving your paid-for search results as well as your natural results should be the pressing issue for a business whose affiliates are attracting more traffic than the main site. If the consumer typed in a specific brand term, they almost certainly have been influenced to some extent by the brand’s own marketing and advertising; failing to optimize search lets these efforts down in the last lap. Understandably, however, businesses feel that affiliates should not charge for leads generated on the back of promotional activity that is not their own.

Because the acquisitions made through affiliates carry an associated cost, marketers tend to devalue them. First, they deduct the cost per acquisition (CPA) charge for affiliates, then the cost for the brand’s own marketing effort—which often drives the consumer on to the search engine—and finally the extra bidding cost of trying to keep the brand at the top of the search results page. Most of the leads, however, are entirely new, so they do represent added value in spite of the cost.

There is, however, another important aspect to consider before letting fears of cannibalisation and plummeting return on investment (ROI) damage the relationship with affiliates. Google has recently relaxed its regulations against bidding on competitor trademark names in most countries. For example, when M&S bid on the term Interflora, M&S appeared on the same search page as the brand. Since Google currently has no regulations against competitor trademark term bidding, affiliates can bid on key brand terms in to keep competitors out of that all-important first search page. While affiliate bidding may add a fractional cost to the process of customer acquisition, competitors really are driving business away with their aggressive bidding.

If relationships with affiliates are managed more openly, concerns over the cannibalisation of traffic can be quelled. Last-minute solutions such as lowering commission budgets and suspending programmes are simply unacceptable and feed into the climate of “every man for himself” on which mistrust is based. Some businesses have even gone as far as making up excuses to legitimise suspension of affiliate programmes over Christmas, a time of the year that affiliates have been gearing up to as much as your own business.

A practical solution that prevents the unease sometimes associated with affiliate relationships is to suggest different rates of commission depending on the different type of lead or customer acquired. This way, for example, if the consumer provided by the affiliate turns out to be a returning customer who has previously bought through the ecommerce site, the payment can be set at a lower rate than if the consumer is an entirely new lead or a person whose custom is only available to the business through the intermediation of affiliates.

There’s no question that the vast majority of brand loyalty is created post click—once consumers are brought to a landing page with relevant offers and other brand messaging.   However, what happens in that 2-3 second window prior to the click?  A lot more brand building than you think.

First impressions count

Search marketers spend countless hours figuring out how to connect consumers to a brand/product, and then articulate that in an ad that won’t get more than a mere glance.  But despite its short lifespan, an ad must be truthful, deliver value, and resonate with consumers.  In essence, it must set the foundation for a good first impression, which is arguably the most important aspect of building brand loyalty.  Moreover, creating such loyalty takes a mutual bond of trust between two entities—the brand and the consumer.  By capitalizing on first impressions, search marketers can start building trust with their customers and prospects.  This is accomplished by developing ads that clearly outline what they are going to do for them, and then delivering upon those promises.

Three elements of building brand loyalty with paid search

So is it really possible to build brand loyalty in a mere two seconds?  In a word, yes.  It all starts with a good first impression.  Below are three key elements that you should consider in your efforts to build brand loyalty with paid search.

1 – Relevance. Granted, quality score matters, and the inherent synergies between keywords, ad copy, and landing pages are critical factors in determining it.  However, marketers must recognize that it is trumped by something else entirely:  delivering a consistent message that is on target and resonates with consumers, from the first impression of ad copy to the content on your site.  Irrelevant keywords, copy, or destinations are the quickest way to ruin a first impression of a brand/product.   How so?  Think of it this way:  For all intents and purposes, a first impression is nothing more than a hunch.  When a consumer sees an ad, they choose to either act upon it or ignore it, based upon that feeling.  So when ad copy and landing pages are irrelevant to a search query, you are essentially instilling the idea that you cannot help the consumer, regardless of whether or not it is true.  The result of such irrelevancy should be obvious:  the consumer becomes frustrated, has the lasting impression that you do not have the product or service they need, and goes back to the search results to find a company that does.  Remember, search is a marketing distribution vehicle.  We push content out to consumers in hopes of converting it into a sale/lead, so make sure you are leveraging content that is relevant to users throughout the entire engagement process, and make every impression count.

2 – Messaging. Consistent and truthful messaging is paramount to building brand loyalty with your audience.  Why?  Because it is fundamental to building trust, and trust is key to any relationship.  Given that, we must do whatever it takes to build this trust with our customers and prospects.  And messaging plays a key role in developing this trust, including the messaging in ads that are displayed in the search results, and the copy on landing pages.  Just as you are asking consumers to eventually buy your products, they are expecting you to be truthful in your ads.  For example, consider the messaging “free coffee.”  Obviously, it implies that a consumer will receive some coffee for free.  When the destination page delivers upon the ad’s promise, it builds trust between the user and the brand.  However, if the landing page does not have the free coffee theme built into it, a disconnect occurs.  The result?  The consumer will bounce, and their trust in the brand will be damaged.

3 – Feedback process. Implementing a feedback process is crucial to building brand loyalty within paid search.  By listening to your consumers, you can tap into a wealth of knowledge and gain tremendous insight.  But feedback should not be limited to just what your customers have to say (via phone, email, forums etc.), as their behavior on the engines and on your site is also very telling.  Understanding what people are doing with your ads—or more importantly, what they are not doing with them—gives you the opportunity to implement significant changes to your ad copy strategy and increase click through rates (CTR).  But focusing on one metric is never a good idea.  Instead, simultaneously analyzing metrics like bounce rates and CTR can help you tap into even better consumer insights.  For instance, you may have a compelling ad with a high CTR, but if you don’t examine the correlation between it and the high bounce rate of the landing page it is driving users to, then you’ll miss the opportunity to improve the situation, and suffer the consequence:  decreased user engagement, and diminished chances of building trust and loyalty.  Ultimately, search marketers need to work to find creative ways to uncover this vital feedback and leverage it to build brand loyalty.

Though it rarely gets credit for it, paid search can do much to help build brand loyalty.  To fully capitalize on these important first impressions as a brand building tool, search marketers need to make every interaction count by making their content relevant, providing truthful and consistent messaging, and listening to their audience through engine and site metrics.  In doing so, they can help turn customers and prospects into brand loyalists.

SEMPO formally released data on the state of search engine marketing, its annual survey of agencies and marketers. This year’s survey consisted of 800 respondents from all over the globle. However 68 percent of respondents were from the US, with 20 percent coming from a range of countries. Seven percent of respondents were from Canada and 5 percent from the UK.

The respondents/clients represented a range of industries. The top sectors were “retail, business services, electronics manufacturing and financial services.”

As part of the findings and related report SEMPO forecast that SEM spending would grow from a projected $14.7 billion in 2009 to $26.1 billion in 2013. SEM is defined broadly as all spending on search-related marketing including SEO. Consequently it represents more than the share of online ad revenues that the IAB assigns to search.

The report is lengthy and extremely detailed. Among other things it explores what marketers are willing to pay for specialized offerings or enhanced targeting including behavioral, local and mobile. Here are some of the high-level findings:

• In the past three years, offline channels are most frequently cannibalized to move budget towards SEM. This year, the top marketing channels advertisers are shifting budgets from are print magazines (26%), direct mail (21%), and print newspapers (19%).
• However, the degree to which certain channels are cannibalized is a bit lower than in last year’s survey. Only a quarter of advertisers (26 percent) report they are shifting budgets from print magazine advertising (down from a third last year), and only 15 percent of advertisers are cannibalizing their web site development budgets. Other channels affected by a shift in spending include TV advertising (13 percent), conferences (10 percent) and print yellow pages (9 percent).
• Organic SEO has always been the favored search marketing tactic among advertisers, but its popularity has risen significantly, from 80% in 2005 and 76% in 2006, nine out of ten advertisers using it the past two year.
• Advertisers are most willing to pay a premium for targeting consumers based on behavioral metrics followed by demographic targeting
• There is growing interest in new platforms for search marketing such as video and mobile search, and growing willingness to pay more for these emerging vehicles

In the context of the debate surrounding whether search is a branding or direct response medium, one of the most interesting findings was that respondents said “brand awareness” was the top goal of paid search, which took over from “sales” in the previous year’s report. The larger the firm the more the goal shifts from sales to brand awareness, which makes a certain amount of logical sense. Still I found it interesting.

Some charts from the report:

Where are marketers transferring budgets from to support paid search?

Source: SEMPO/Radar Research (2/09)

Overall the report shows the search industry to be maturing and increasingly sophisticated, diversifying into a range of related digital media.

If your company has a major brand, domainers who exploit cybersquatting have likely already targeted your business. Their practices are often looked down upon, but if their dark powers weren’t effective, they wouldn’t make money. Still, you can learn the same black magic and turn it into good and profit for your company. In this down economy, don’t ignore the shady domainers—instead, strike back by reducing what they’re costing you and increasing your profits! Read on and I’ll explain how.

I don’t want to stray too far off into a tangent, but terminology has been rapidly shifting about, so I’ll touch on that briefly. “Domaining” is the practice of buying domain names, with the intent of later selling them at a profit. “Domaineering” is a relatively new term the industry is employing to refer to obtaining domain names to use as an advertising medium.

Frequently, domaineers seek to buy valuable keyword domains that people might reasonably go to directly as “type-in traffic” and then park ad content on them, making PPC revenue off the clicks of users who come to the site.

Cybersquatters are unethical domainers or domaineers who obtain trademarked and service-marked terms as domain names in order to make money off of the intellectual property of others. In most cases these days, cybersquatters cannot compel companies to buy back their own marks as domains, since those companies can often force the cybersquatter to relinquish the domain without profit. So, cybersquatters are more frequently taking the domaineering route, buying up domains, and keeping a low profile while profiting off of the clickthroughs of the ads targeted to the victimized brand names. (Such variant brand name domains can also be sold for profit on the gray market.)

So, how do they get away with it—why aren’t they noticed?

Unethical domaineers are highly adept at generating variations upon brand name domains. They register common misspellings of brand name domains, frequently occurring typos, lookalike domains and related stems (registering a plural for a singular term, for instance).

When I used to work for Verizon (now Idearc) Superpages.com, I occasionally assisted the intellectual property department in policing and referring infringing domains over to them for handling. Although back when the new company name was launched Verizon proactively registered a great many of these variant names and used MarkMonitor to help watch for more, there were always new product names being introduced that allowed openings for cybersquatters and character combinations that their monitoring missed. (Not to mention, the IP department seemed more hyper-focused on “Verizon” name derivatives, and less on satellite brands like “Superpages.com”.)

Over time, I’ve run across a great many cases of cybersquatting—not just with Verizon, but also with a really large number of major name-brand sites.

It took me only a few minutes to find some examples like these:

• www.cokacola.com
• www.veriz0n.com
• www.verizpn.com
• www.g00g1e.com
• www.1bm.com
• www.micr0s0ft.com
• www.go0gle.com
• www.g0ogle.com
• www.googlw.com
• www.microosft.com

While you can imagine that these major name brands like Coca-Cola, Verizon, Google, IBM and Microsoft are all big targets for this sort of thing due to their high popularity, lesser brands are also targets for this and are frequently far less well policed. (As of the time of writing this article, none of these domains are pointing to the official sites of the brand names the domains are based upon.)

Many of these types of domains are essentially stealing brand traffic—they are brand parasites. Even worse, a number of the major brand companies involved are actually paying the parasites to do this! You can often find PPC ads from the victimized companies appearing on the typosquatting sites, and money also passes to innocent affiliates and distributors whose ads also appear on these sites. Innocent or no, the money often should be going to you directly rather than going through them due to a bogus domain.

Stop paying parasitic middlemen, and take back your brand! Force the bad guys to relinquish infringing domains, and get them pointed directly at your site!

Using their same methodologies, seriously consider registering other variant names and 301 redirect all of them to your main site.

While an individual misspelling may bring you relatively small amounts of traffic, this sort of long-tail-brand-traffic can definitely add up over time. A single brand name can have quite a lot of potential misspelling and typo variations as well—in bulk, the traffic from all of these could actually give your site a small bump up.

Also, if you proactively block the unethical domainers from nabbing your brand-variation domains, you’ll save money you’d pay to them in advertising fees and money you’d pay to affiliates, and your legal department would be saved considerable time and money in the long run.

Just as a best practice, misspellings of your brand/domain names should be registered by you and 301 redirected to your main domain.

Here’s a list of types of domain name variations that squatters exploit:

• Word stems – plural and singular forms of words, other versions associated with the word (example: ”macy.com“ );
• Misspellings – (common/uncommon misspellings, phonetic spellings)
• Typos
• Versions of words with various letters dropped off
• Versions of words with extra letters inserted (such as adding extra “www” at beginning of names) Ex: wwwgoogle.com
• Transposed letters
• Lookalikes: domains with various letters exchanged for other characters which closely resemble them
• Other permutations – multiple-word domains with dashes or underscores separating the words
• Homophones or phonetic spellings (example: EyePhone.com)
• Domains with another Top Level Domain (”TLD”) suffix, such as .NET, .BIZ, .INFO, .FR, .BE, .IT, .DE, etc.
• Domains of your name translated into the equivalent word(s) in another language?

Since there can be various combinations of all of the above, there are many combinations possible for a company’s brand names! And, don’t just limit it to the company name alone. All a company’s marks should be checked for this sort of thing.

Nearly everyone who owns a domain name has got a domainer cleverly receiving traffic when people mistype the “.COM” part of their domain names—if you leave out the “O”, you end up getting redirected to an affiliate site, an ad, or to a parked domain page. Ex:

• www.microsoft.cm

This is because the famous domainer, Kevin Ham , made a deal with the country of Cameroon to allow him to wildcard any unregistered domain name traffic for the .CM TLD.

And, there have long been rumors he might eventually persuade the Colombian governing body to allow a similar arrangement with the “.CO” TLD!

There are tools out there which can help you to automatically generate lists of variation words to use as domain names, if you want to police your brand.

One of the best tools for this used to be a Microsoft research project, Strider URL Tracer with Typo-Patrol—it was once my favorite tool. Unfortunately, this project is no longer being supported and upgraded by Microsoft.  I wish they’d bring it back!

There are others out there as well such as this one. There’s also a number of desktop software packages which do the same sorts of things.

If you’re not adept at this, though, you might also consider hiring someone who can assess your unique situation, generate the brand name permutation lists, check them for squatters, and then recommend ongoing strategies to you. As you can see, these guys are clever, and not everyone can think like them.

If you have a major name-brand and are a publicly traded company, it really behooves you to find the cases of cybersquatting associated with your brand names, and force the owners to relinquish them to you (unless it is a “fair use”). This is a necessary part of protecting your marks. Buy up other variations of your domain as well, and 301 redirect all of these back to your main homepage. By doing this you can save money by cutting out the parasites and middlemen, and you can also increase your organic traffic through all those long-tail-brand domain referrals that start rolling up into your homepage.

When brand awareness is the goal, it’s sometimes easy to implement PPC as a “go to” for increasing awareness quickly and effectively. But, paid search is just one part of a broader, long-term brand awareness campaign.

This week’s infographic explores how SEMs can utilize all facets of search to achieve increased brand awareness.

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Everyone managing cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns lives by three magic letters that can make the difference between a friendly pat on the back and a hefty push on the back… out the door. Those letters are ROI (return on investment). Put another way, are you bringing in more money from your CPC campaigns than you are paying out in clicks?

I say “everyone,” but maybe I should clarify: everyone who actually has something they can measure their ROI against—be it product sales, lead generation, or maybe just newsletter signups. But what if you don’t have a hard measurement—what if your aim is purely brand visibility?

How can you get your site to appear in relevant search results, not for any financial gain, but to simply achieve even more awareness and exposure for your brand?

The first and most obvious way is to ensure you always appear under your own brand name. Even if yours is a well known brand and already appearing top of the organic results, it’s worth doing. For a very cheap CPC, you can ensure you also always appear for the (often surprisingly high) number of brand variations and misspellings people will use to find you. You’ll often not show up organically for your brand misspellings (though you may find your competition is using CPC to ensure they are cashing in on your misfortune), so it’s a good opportunity to ensure you’re not missing out on potential visibility.

Utilizing the ad copy also gives a valuable opportunity to shout about your biggest unique selling propositions, latest developments, or marketing messages, perhaps sending visitors off to a specific landing page as opposed to the homepage Google may have indexed for you.

A second method is to try and appear in the search results for the many products or services your company offers. Not only is this is a great way to generate lots more traffic to your site, but it can increase your company’s image as a leader in your market.

If your company offers thousands of products, this can be no small feat and needs very tight reins to ensure that this visibility is maximized without the need for a massive budget. Here are some ways to do this:

1. Constantly adapt the keyword list to ensure you’re only paying to promote the products that your company is focusing on in any given month. This will require a close relationship with your sales / admin teams to get monthly updates.

2. Appearing anywhere in the top 4 positions is sufficient for the aims of providing both traffic and visibility. The easiest way to achieve this ranking is to use Google AdWords Editor, where you can:

• Use the “showing stats for:” option to bring up the stats for all keywords

• Sort them by “Average Position”
• Highlight all terms showing up below position 4
• Click on the “Advanced bid changes” link
• Use the option to increase all highlighted words’ CPC by 10 percent

Start with fairly low CPC across the board and repeat this process once a week, gradually increasing the bids that are falling short of the target position. You’ll find that the list of terms outside the top 4 will reduce quite quickly. Set yourself a maximum keyword CPC limit based on the budget you have available, and when that is reached you’ll be left with terms that are just too expensive and will have to be disregarded or changed to a less expensive variant.

3. You’ll have to accept that you are never going to be able to appear across all products for all searches, even when narrowed down to just your specific headings. The best option for maximizing traffic and visibility is to appear under just a couple of very broad terms for each product—use keyword tools to ascertain what prospects and customers are most likely to search for.

4. Use Exact Match or at least Phrase Match to help keep the visibility to only these core terms. Using broad match with lots of negatives is another angle to come from, but with thousands of terms it can be overly time-consuming.

5. Some keywords will get very high levels of traffic and can eat into a disproportionately large amount of your daily budget, thereby decreasing the potential exposure of all your other terms.

If this happens to you, then a quick fix is to create a separate campaign with its own capped spending amount and add the few over-performing ad groups into it. They’ll fight over this limited budget, leaving the bulk of your money for the less greedy terms.

6. There are lots of research articles out there stating that you should ideally show CPC adverts even if you are appearing high organically. That is an ideal world, but if you are looking to maximize your exposure with a limited budget then only target the areas that organic is not covering. This is one of the trickiest areas to manage, and although you can do this manually, there is a quicker way to do this.

Export all your Google campaigns as a CSV file (again, Google AdWords Editor is excellent for this) and import them into a search engine visibility tool to find out those terms with organic rankings. Export out of this tool and set all these organically appearing terms to “Paused” in the status column, which will be showing on the original exported CSV spreadsheet. Simply import this back into Google AdWords Editor and all organic terms will stop showing.

7. Using Day Parting means your adverts will only show up when your prospects and customers are typically going to be looking for these products on Google—i.e., 8am to 6pm on weekdays. This can be set up via the “Edit Campaign Settings” page and is a vital tool to help maximize the budget so it saves the exposure for when it can have the greatest impact.

Matt Lester is the Search Marketing Executive for Kellysearch.com, a comprehensive online buyers’ guide and vertical search engine, with more than two million company listings from over 155 countries worldwide.

Since the advent of “blended” or “universal search” last year across the major engines, there’s been ongoing discussion and speculation about its impact on user behavior and search marketing. Gord Hotchkiss last year wrote extensively about how blended search (on Google) has in fact shifted the user focus from the so-called “golden triangle” at the upper left of the page to a more distributed pattern that resembles an “E.”

Now search marketing firm iProspect has released a study (conducted by JupiterResearch) that shows users are responding to the various specialized content types within search results and are more engaged with them than they are the vertical search silos the search engine have historically offered. Just over 2,400 US adults participated in the iProspect survey, conducted in December 2007 and January of this year. It focused on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search.

Among the various content types now showing up in blended search, “news” results were found to be the most clicked form of vertical content. The study’s overall findings reinforce a point increasingly being made: marketers need to broaden and optimize their various content types to be found in blended search results.

Here are the top-level findings of the iProspect study:

• 36 percent of search engine users click “news” results within blended search results, while only 17 percent click a “news” result after conducting a news-specific search

• 31 percent of search engine users click “image” results within blended search results, while 26 percent click an “image” result after conducting an image-specific search
• 17 percent of search engine users click “video” results within blended search results, while only 10 percent click a “video” result after conducting a video-specific search While images are the most clicked type of result after a vertical-specific search, news items are the most clicked type of result within blended search results

This higher user engagement with vertical content in traditional web search results comes as no surprise. Vertical search tabs have been largely neglected by users historically (except for image search), as this Hitwise survey of the traffic distribution on various Google properites illustrates:

Source: Hitwise, January, 2008

The following charts from the iProspect survey are graphical presentations of the data points cited above, showing the contrast between usage of vertical search in their respective content silos and the higher engagement (clicks) on vertical content within the main search results:

The study also found growth in the user bias toward the first page of search results:

• 68 percent of search engine users typically click results on the first page of search results, compared to 62 percent in 2006, and 60 percent in 2004

• Only 8 percent of search engine users review more than the first three pages prior to clicking on a result
• 49 percent of search engine users who continue their search when not finding what they are looking for change and/or re-launch their search after reviewing just the first page of search results, up from 40 percent in 2006, and 42 percent in 2004

Finally, the study also found an increase in the brand impact associated with appearance at the top of search results: “37 percent of online users associate appearance at the top of search results with a company’s leadership within its industry or category, up slightly from 35 percent in 2006 and 33 percent in 2002.”

This latter point has been made in the past, but it reinforces the notion that search marketing has to be taken seriously as a branding medium. That is being made easier to swallow for many agencies and brand marketers by the recent inclusion of video in paid search ads on Google and Yahoo.

Ever walk into a store to purchase something, only to find it’s not there? You know what you want and you’re ready to buy, but you can’t find it. Bewildered, you paw through the shelves, searching high and low, but to no avail. Exasperated, you leave.

Sound like fun? Hardly. When you walked into that store you had expectations. When you walked out, all you had was disappointment.

Clearly, consumer expectations are very real, but keep in mind that they’re not limited to brick and mortar venues. Online consumers have the same expectations as their offline counterparts. Likewise, so do search users. In fact, people visiting a “search shelf”—a search results page—expect the same experience as people visiting a shelf in a retail store.

Doubtful? A recent SEMPO study proves my point.

The study reveals that the majority of those surveyed expect leading brands to be at the top of their search results (71%), and that they have been introduced to new brands/companies via search (71%). In addition, the study’s respondents reported that search helps them find information on more than where to buy things (67%); and that search allows them to make better buying decisions (76%).

Clearly, these results are anything but surprising. In fact, they seem intuitive. But if consumers expect the same experience at the search shelf as they do at the store shelf, one would think that marketers would make it easy for people to find them online.

Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

The truth is that more often than not, people do not find what they are looking for right away when conducting searches online. In fact, the same study reveals that the majority (54%) of those surveyed indicate that it takes them a few searches before they find exactly what they need. The implication of this finding should be obvious: There’s a lot of room for improvement in how marketers promote their brands and products online.

What’s a marketer to do? You need a plan. To start, I recommend the following:

The first thing you need to do is to define what the search shelf looks like for your category. This in itself is hugely important, but even more so given the development of blended search results in the major search engines. Specifically, you need to understand what the typical results page looks like, and where the data is being pulled from to populate the various results. For example, is it coming from YouTube, Flickr, or is it a blog or product feed? The answers to these questions will play a key role in the development of your plan.

Once you have defined your search shelf, you can build out a robust search plan that will address the various sources of search results to ensure maximum exposure in the results set against your critical keywords. In addition, benchmarks are an important component of this plan — be sure to set them so you can gauge your success. For example, maybe you will want to measure how much space you want to occupy on the search shelf. Owning shelf space is a critical in-store success factor — why shouldn’t the same rules apply here?

Next, you need to execute this plan flawlessly. Be mindful, however, that you will need to get creative with your efforts for certain sites or digital assets. Why? You need to make sure you can get your content indexed there so that Google and Yahoo! can go pull it from those sites. For example, on many product related searches, the engines will display product results at the top of the page. The product results actually come from other comparison shopping engines or sites like Drugstore.com. Examples like this one demonstrate why it is so important to define the search shelf before creating your plan.

Once you have executed your plan, you need to measure, reassess, and refine. Did you meet your original success metrics in terms of traffic or space occupied? Did these visitors take the course of action you wanted them to? There are no hard and fast rules to this. You need to constantly evaluate how you are doing, and continually test and make adjustments.

Remember, everybody has expectations — especially your customers and prospects. The question is, are you meeting them? Whether they are looking at the store shelf or the search shelf, their expectations are the same. Smart marketers realize this and will work to help their customers and prospects easily find their brands and products, regardless of where the shelf is.

Robert J. Murray is president of search engine marketing firm iProspect and can be reached at rob.murray@iprospect.com. The Brand Aid column appears Wednesdays at Search Engine Land.