As search engine marketers, we feel we’re blazing a trail into a completely new kind of marketing. To some extent, that’s true. Yet we can learn from our offline counterparts. Some best practices used by direct marketers and offline brand marketers can be adapted to search engine marketing (SEM).

Marketing is progressing, and SEM is just another phase in its evolution. By learning from traditional marketing, we avoid pouring huge sums of money into advertising and marketing with little to show for it.

Once, I worked as an account executive at McCann-Erickson. I constantly quizzed my media team about the media selection process. It was fascinating. Planners were forced to rely on media audits and syndicated research. Using a variety of means, they validated the claims of TV, radio, and print venues, along with the sales teams representing those media, against the media plan and defined target audience. Most advertising we bought and managed wasn’t trackable, even if the ad had a call to action. Reach and frequency estimates helped planners know if the plan was reaching the target at an appropriate level.

Unlike the pay-per-click (PPC) search space in which most inventories are auctioned in real time, traditional offline, even other online media, are heavily negotiated. Lessons learned from my savvy media director include:

• Always put the most important and efficient medium on your plan first.
• At the right price, almost any medium can be included in a media plan.
• The media plan is a living document; don’t fall in love with specific insertions or placements.
• Branding metric lift is a valuable success proxy, but sales are the real success barometer.
• Spend the client’s money as if it were your own.

These lessons apply almost directly to the PPC search market and can provide a strategic basis for a PPC campaign. Below, I’ll address each media buying best practice and convert it into a PPC search best practice.

1. Always put the most important and efficient medium on your plan first.
In the auction marketplaces at Google, Yahoo!, and soon MSN, you want to buy the very best clicks first. If you know the value of every keyword’s click-stream in every engine by knowing the clicks’ value, you’ll know how to buy the best clicks first. Your best clicks are “power clicks,” those with a demonstrated value (typically, a huge return on investment (ROI)).

To catch all power clicks, don’t set a daily budget in a tool managed by the engine. Not all clicks are created equal. A budget cap lower than full rotation on your keywords results in a somewhat random selection of which keywords won’t be shown. Power keywords could be skipped in favour of less valuable ones. Have a strategy in place that assures you buy the best clicks first, and then continue buying until the budget is exhausted or you no longer get a positive ROI.

2. At the right price, almost any medium can be included in a media plan.
Each marketer has a right price for the clicks originating from each keyword/search engine/position/creative/time-of-day combination. One click-stream can be worth 10 times that of another. Don’t think about your campaign in CPC terms. Buy clicks based on value. Almost any keyword can potentially work in a PPC search campaign. The auction nature of the search marketplace tends to ensure marketers at the top are a good fit for the search.

3. The media plan is a living document; don’t fall in love with specific insertions or placements.
Don’t fall in love with a position. There may be keywords your CEO or CMO feels must be in the top position. This emotional response must be backed up with data. Otherwise, alternative placements will fit better. When multiple marketers in a vertical category all bid emotionally, the only winners are the search engines.

4. Branding metric lift is a valuable success proxy, but sales are the real success barometer.
Branding metrics are difficult to ascribe to search, but when much of the purchase behaviour lags offline or is otherwise untraceable, you can create a branding-style proxy for success. However, behaviours you associate with brand lift should ultimately associate with sales. Brand lift among the wrong target audience is worthless. Brand lift among potential buyers is priceless, as it correlates with sales.

5. Spend the client’s money as if it were your own.
Whoever’s money you’re spending, either as an agency or in-house marketer, treat that budget as if it were your money. Invest it wisely. Also listen to the person signing the checks; she may have a strategic goal or objective that isn’t immediately obvious. I was in recent discussions with a marketing VP who was clearly looking to maximize exposure not only to drive revenue but also to increase visibility in the investment community.

Media and Marketing 101 never went out of style; the best practices simply manifest themselves differently. Take a step back from your campaign and apply the proven tenets of media and marketing. You’ll be glad you did.

By Kevin Lee

Let me preface this report by citing advertisers in 2004 have spent 4 Billion dollars on search engine marketing according to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO).? Website marketers cited Search engine positioning was the top method to drive traffic to their sites (66%), followed by email marketing (54%). Source: Direct Marketing Association. Accordingly, the most cost effective way to market your web site online is to obtain several top 10-search engine rankings in the major search engines for your keywords.

According to a recent Jupiter Research Survey, searching on the search engines is one of the main uses of the Internet among 79% of users. Source: September 2002 Jupiter Research Survey. So that being the case, whatever your promoting you’ll want to make sure it can be found on the first page of the search engines results page.? The reason is numerically simple. An I-Prospect Survey in 2002 reported that 78% of web users abandon their search if the first 3 pages don’t provide an answer to their question, and 28% don’t scroll past the 2nd page of results. Source: Media Post article reporting results of Spring 2002 I-Prospect survey.

Combine those facts with the Internet’s explosive growth rate of 1.8 Million people worldwide going online every week for the very first time, Source: Official Guide To Internet Promotion and you can soon appreciate what a top 10 ranking can mean to you.? Google receives approximately 39.4% of all search engine traffic. Yahoo receives approximately 30.4%. They’re simply the largest search engines being utilized online today.

Bringing up the rear is MSN at 29.6%, and AOL 15.5% then AskJeeves with 8.5%. Source: Nielsen//NetRatings January 2004? How much traffic is that? Well, Google and its partner sites were reporting a whopping 250 million searches a day in February 2003.

Overture and its partners were reporting over 167 million searches per day. Inktomi reported 80 million followed by LookSmart with 45 million per day.? FindWhat reported 33 million while AskJeeves reported 20 million; Alta Vista reported 18 million and finally Fast reported 12 Million searches per day. Source: Searchenginewatch.com 2004.

With all said, you can easily see how your search engine rankings are directly proportional to the traffic your web site receives, and your site traffic is directly related to your potential to profit online.? Oh, and in case your wondering how much money is spent online; a recent Forrester Research Report indicated that online spending reached $95,700,000,000 million in 2003! That’s a cool 95.7 billion dollars. Projected online spending is estimated to grow to $229 billion in 2008! A whopping 139% increase in online spending! Source: Forrester Research.

Now with these facts in mind I’m confident you can clearly see what a top 10-search engine ranking can mean for your bottom line. Although it does leave a question unanswered in my mind, what has a higher ROI… organic search engine optimization or paid search?? According to SEMPO’s key analysis, the U.S. & Canadian SEM Industry Size Estimate by tactic in 2004, organic SEO accounted for 12% of the market share or $492,057,200 while Paid Placement accounted for $3,341,878,176 or 81.8%.

Interestingly, 9 out of 10 respondents are actively engaged in organic SEM marketing programs accounting for 89% of the respondent advertisers. This trend can be contributed to the average cost of popular keywords continuing to escalate.? If the escalation continues to rise it could make paid search engine advertising exponentially cost prohibitive for all but the largest advertisers… the 900lb gorillas!

Simply put, ROI is outpacing inflation: SEMPO’s key analysis indicates advertisers could afford to pay on average 33% more for their keywords and remain profitable, while they say prices have gone up 26% on average in the last 12 months. That leaves a 7% advertising margin to maintain current profits for 2005!? SEMPO’s data also noted that advertisers will get smarter about managing their paid placement programs before they cut back on spending.

This is also consistent with a report released by Nielsen/ NetRatings indicating that the growing demand for search engine advertising is outstripping the supply of currently available advertising space.? These findings seem to indicate the inventory of keywords is approaching a critical demand problem however; most advertisers felt they still have some degree of price flexibility in their paid placement programs before they reach the threshold of diminishing returns.

Is there any wonder why organic search engine positioning has gained popularity for online marketers in 2004? Could it be higher (ROI) return on investments?? SEMPO also cites that 43% of advertiser respondents have shifted their budgets away from other marketing programs for Organic SEO.

So what does it all mean? Let the numbers speak for themselves.? Organic SEO is undeniably gaining favour over the lower ROI paid advertising. This is evidenced by virtue of the fact that paid advertising is becoming less profitable.

Although paid advertising will continue to hold a large portion of the market share, as paid advertising returns diminish and keyword costs soar, my early 2005 forecast is for the materialization of a progressive organic SEO market trend to facilitate the need for advertising space.

By Lawrence Deon

One of the most fascinating aspects of the web is its dynamism. We all know that it develops at an astonishing speed - yesterday’s craze is today’s old news, and bigger and better things seem to be springing up every few days. Some of them crumble quickly into dust, while others seem destined to tower above the rest.

Naturally, search engines also follow this pattern. Some of the early search engine giants remain with us today, but many of them are gone - and every so often, a new champion seems to emerge. Recent years have seen the growth and development of a search engine that puts all others to shame. It might have once stood at the same level as its rivals, but there is no doubt that for now at least, Google rules the web.

Many of the companies we work with see more traffic from Google than all the other search engines put together, and there are more than a few Search Engine Optimization services that focus almost exclusively on this one engine.

What is Google’s Secret?
So why is Google so successful? The answer is simply that when a user goes searching on Google, they’re likely to find what they’re looking for, and more quickly than on any other search engine. Exactly how Google manages to do this is trickier to answer, as they tend to guard their secrets well. They don’t want us to know too much about how they determine their search results, simply because they don’t want anyone to be able to manipulate their own ranking.

Of course, human nature dictates that many of us aren’t satisfied with this. We desperately want to be able to affect the ranking of our sites, and some of us will go to great lengths to do so. We work hard to find the perfect keywords, tweak our Meta tags and optimize the content of our site to what we hope is Google perfection.

But recently, a new word has entered our vocabulary, and is surrounded by so much hype that very few people actually have a realistic understanding of what it is - or what it isn’t. PageRank is where the attention is focused today, and many companies are determined to find a means of improving their magic number. “I want to be an eight,” they say, as if PageRank was a dress size that they could grow into with the help of some heavy-duty calorie shots. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy as that.

So what exactly is PageRank? There’s a surprisingly simple answer: it is Google’s way of estimating how important a web page is. On a basic level, Google decides that if one page links to another, the second page must be considered important. If one page on one site has 15,000 pages linking to it, it must be for a good reason, right?

Page Rank is About Pages, Not Websites
Let’s begin by straightening out a few basic points. First of all, PageRank is assigned on a page-by-page basis. A whole website does not have this score, and different pages within a site can have very different PageRank values assigned. Another important point is that the rating (out of ten) assigned is essentially little more than an approximation of a given page’s PageRank. The actual values cover a far greater range than zero to ten.

Before going any further, we should take a look at the most important point of all, often overlooked when we get caught up in the PageRank frenzy. PageRank is only one factor that Google takes into account when displaying the results of a search. There are still other factors of equal significance in performing well on Google - so don’t make the mistake of thinking that you would live happily ever after if your PageRank was a little bit higher. Other factors include a page’s title, and the use of keywords within the page’s text - not in the keyword meta tag.

PageRank is still one of Google’s more ingenious strategies, and is certainly one of the many reasons that it stands head and shoulders above the rest. Partly, this is due to a combination of two factors. First is that the very nature of PageRank is difficult (but not impossible) to manipulate, and secondly that the exact details of how the value is assigned is a closely guarded secret.

However, there is one very useful source of data - an academic paper detailing the formula used to calculate PageRank from Google’s early beginnings as a university project. This formula will have certainly been altered and expanded over the years, but it is generally accepted that it still represents the essence of their PageRank system.

The Page Rank Formula
The exact details are lengthy, and far beyond what I am capable of dissecting. But the basic formula is as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + �.. + PR (Tn)/C(Tn))

PR(A) is the PageRank of a particular page (A) - not a website as a whole.

1-d is the dampening factor, as explained below.

PR(T1) is the PageRank of the page that links to our (A) page, and C(T1) is the number of links contained on that same page.

The formula is repeated throughout every single page that contains a link to this (A) page.

Two important points to take into account. First of all, if you’re thinking that the formula would in practice be an infinite loop, then you’re correct. This is the very nature of the web itself, and is also why Google has introduced the so called dampening factor.

The second point concerns the way that PageRank is awarded by one page to another. The generally accepted means of understanding this is to consider that a given page has, according to its own PageRank, a certain amount of voting power. If the page in question links to five other pages, then each of the pages being linked to receive their PageRank “award” of one fifth of the original page’s voting power. It’s also worth noting that the number of links on a page includes a website’s internal links.

Link Farms Don’t Work
This makes it quite obvious that the so-called link farms, where each page of a website contains many hundreds of links in an attempt to artificially boost so called “link popularity”, are doomed to fail from the start. In addition to this, Google has its own system for not only minimizing the effect that these sites have, but eliminating it altogether. As the formula shows, PageRank works as a multiplier of a site’s overall value, so Google has made sure that link farms have their own value of zero - which means that a link from them counts for nothing, quite literally.

There is a scare story doing the rounds which claims that being listed on link popularity sites, or for that matter any site with a large number of links, can get your site penalized or even banned from Google. This is simply not the case. If it were, you’d effectively be able to wipe-out your competition’s Google presence with one afternoon’s work. It doesn’t work that way.

Having links to your web pages on sites with a low page rank and a large number of links means that the benefits are quite effectively minimized to zero. But this will not detract from your current PageRank at all.

Obviously, what people really want to know is whether PageRank can be manipulated. In the past it was often considered impossible to do so, but nowadays this is not always the case. There are two simple factors involved: First: who links to you, and how they choose to do so. Secondly: your own website’s navigation and internal links.

Clearly, the sheer number of pages linking to you will not influence your PageRank. Of far greater importance is the PageRank of each of these pages, and how many links appear on them. Common sense certainly needs to be applied h�re. In theory, one simple way to improve your PageRank might be to have Microsoft link to you from the front page of their website. In practice, this might be a little difficult to achieve.

It is already quite clear that linking out to another website, even if it opens in a new browser window, actually involves potentially giving away a lot more than a little space on your website. My advice would be to look at your link exchanges as you would your food. You always want to make sure you’re not leaving yourself hungry, and if you do choose to share, be selective. Exchanging a piece of your sirloin steak for a small piece of stale bread, shared between hundreds of people, is far from an even trade. If you’re doing so to help another site, as an act of charity, then this is fine and well, as long as you know what you’re giving away. Choose wisely.

Well-known Websites and Their PageRank
Now that we have a basic understanding of how PageRank works, let’s take a look at some of the more well-known websites on the web today, and see how their main pages perform.

Finding out a page’s PageRank couldn’t be simpler. Follow the link to Services and Tools from the Google home page, and find the Google Toolbar. After installing the software, a bar appears at the top of the browser showing a value for each page you’re visiting. Hold the mouse over the bar, and you’ll be told the page’s PageRank - a score out of ten. As already mentioned, this figure is little more than a representation of a page’s actual PageRank.

Not surprisingly, very few pages score ten out of ten, and those that do include the likes of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google itself, AltaVista, Adobe, AOL, Mozilla.org and others. In other words we’re looking at the biggest of the biggest websites - and not something that most of us could ever hope to achieve!

Of course, there is a simple reason that search engines and directories have such a high PageRank. Not only do they link to a huge, ever-growing list of sites and pages, but more importantly, a truly staggering number of these sites and pages link back to them. When you consider the importance of reciprocal linking, you start to understand why they do so well. With Adobe, you only need to consider the sheer number of web pages out there that link to a PDF file (with links to Adobe for their free reader software), and you will see why they have achieved such a high number.

A nine out of ten score still puts you within a very small minority of the web. Should you be able to achieve this high a PageRank, you’ll be rubbing shoulders with the likes of MSN, BBC News, Winzip and Internet.com. We’re talking about the web’s upper classes - not really attainable for the majority of normal website owners.

Eight out of ten starts bringing you to the “reachable” web. You’ll find sites such as CNN, TuCows, Simtel, the Association of Shareware Professionals, the Shareware Industry Conference site and Lockergnome. A PageRank of seven is starting to appear reasonably attainable, as long as we’re willing to work hard on the content and reputation of your site. The sevens include companies such as D-Link, MSNBC, CNET’s Download.com and our very own SharewarePromotions.com.

Don’t Lose Your Perspective!
At this point, a little perspective might be in order. A critical point to remember is that PageRank only plays a part in performing well in Google. PageRank’s primary aim involves ranking the results of a search - but in order to show up in the search to start with, your site needs to be properly optimized and have good, solid content. So contrary to popular belief, the era of Search Engine Optimization is far from over. It’s only had a new, interesting factor thrown into it.

Finally, a note of caution. This article has been an attempt to very briefly summarize an enormously complicated subject. Aside from constraints of space, much of the workings of PageRank remain shrouded in mystery. The ideas presented are based on available data, known facts, speculation and my own experience - but none of it should be considered as insurmountable fact!

PageRank is undoubtedly an important factor in how much traffic you will receive from Google. It is, however, merely one component in your arsenal of tools to win the battle for one particular search engine. Even with the constantly evolving web, and the ever-tightening systems employed by the search engines to quantify the usefulness of a website, content is still by far the most important factor, and will invariably be the base on which everything else is built. Be seen, be sold.

By Dave Collins