In a sort of Copernican way, the new Google keyword tool looks at what already exists on your site and pulls out relevant searchable keywords, which sets it apart from your average run-of-the-mill keyword list building tools.

What’s really cool about the search-based keyword tool is that it lets you sign into your AdWords account. Once you do this and enter a website into the word-box, it queries your current keyword mix and populates an extensive list of keywords that are not currently existent in your account. This is a great thing for marketers who have spent countless amounts of hours thinking, “Okay, I’m buying thousands of keywords, but what else am I missing?”

There’s also a small competitive advantage to the search based keyword tool, since it lets you enter any website. Even though it only returns 100 results if you are not signed into AdWords, that’s still 100 more competitive insights you had before using it.

Let’s focus on three key areas:

1. Campaign settings
2. Keyword match types
3. Keyword bid optimization

1. Campaign Settings

Check your campaign settings and ask yourself the following questions:

• Are my geo-targeting settings correct? If you are selling a product that only ships within the United States, don’t target “All Countries and Locations.” I know it sounds simple, but I can’t tell you how many accounts I’ve seen that have wasted dollars on such a careless mistake.
• Are my networks and bidding settings correct? Keep search and content separate…always. If one is checked, then other should not be. It’s a major money waster to not separate search and content campaigns. Refer to a more in-depth explanation in this blog post about Google Content Network Best Practices.
• Is my daily budget big enough? Review the daily budgets of all your campaigns. It’s possible you might need to shift things around a bit. Your campaigns with the best conversion-driving keywords should get the most budget dollars allocated to them. You don’t want these campaigns turning off prematurely, because it could mean a huge loss in revenue.

2. Keyword Match Types

Ask yourself:

• Which match types am I currently using? Which should I be using?

Think about your search terms. If you are only buying broad match keywords, you need to change this strategy right away. Ideally, you should do some keyword research and buy long-tail terms in both exact and phrase match. As a quick fix, however, you can copy and paste your entire keyword inventory into other match types in AdWords Editor. Buying multiple match types is a way of making your keyword mix more efficient, but be careful setting up the different bid amounts. If your broad match keyword bid is higher than your exact and phrase keywords, then it will be triggered and most likely have a higher average CPC. Also, if you are not using negative match keywords to block off irrelevant traffic, you are making a pretty big booboo as well. Learn more about match types.

3. Keyword Bid Optimization

Run a keyword report covering the last few months. Download the report into Excel, and look for 2 big things that might stand out:

• High cost keywords - Sort keywords by cost and pick out any keywords that have not had conversions in the last few months but have spent a lot of money. For example, a keyword with $2,568 in spend and zero sales is a pretty good clue that it should be paused.  If they have had a conversion or two but the cost per conversion is still pretty high, you might considering lowering the bid.
• Low cost conversions - Look at the keywords with the most conversions and lowest cost. Are they in a high enough position? Can they be even higher? If the cost per conversion is really low, you might want to raise bids on these keywords for higher positions and see if it increases volume.

• Operates on a CPC bidding model.
• Video is triggered by designated keywords.
• Promotion text has the same character limits as Google ads (25, 35, 35).

Here’s a great video demonstrating how to create ads and also how they are displayed.

Google search ads have a tendency to be used heavily (or solely) by direct marketers and are not really applicable for aspiring artists and the like.  However, YouTube ads provide the starving artist an outlet for greater visibility and comfort in knowing their video will be seen.  The trick is, they need to be able to afford it.  Will the garage band down the street use YouTube ads?  Will YouTube ads become viral or will the community view them as sellouts (no pun intended)?  My guess is the garage band sticks to their MySpace page, and YouTube ads stay that way, as ads.

In addition to those serving our country, members not in the military can create an account as a civilian friend or family member and can easily upload and share videos.  TroopTube does say that members have the option to share videos with everyone or only with a select few, but I couldn’t really tell how a member chooses who can view the video, or if a member can have “friends” to choose from.

The site is only in its Beta version and was created by Military OneSource, an authorized Department of Defense program that provides support to Active Duty, Guard, Reserve, and their families.  There are few videos, but I am sure that is only because the site just launched.

I love how social networking has made its way into every nook of society and even the armed forces see its value. I just hope as the hunt to monetize social media continues TroopTube is left alone.  It embodies the core values social networking started with - finding a way to connect when you’re not there.  To me, a TroopTube member is going to the site for one purpose, most likely with limited time, and wouldn’t be interested in anything other than new videos from friends and families, so what’s the point to try and monetize if they can’t be easily distracted?  We’ll see what happens…..

It gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of the newest division of NETexponent – AffiliateBenchmarks. AffiliateBenchmarks will focus solely on marketing research and education in this niche space.  The goal of this division is to produce research studies that will benefit the affiliate marketing community while maintaining its own unique identity. We mentioned our survey effort in previous blog posts and provided more detail on questions asked, etc. This survey will be the inaugural survey for this new division and we will continue to launch research papers on a periodic basis.

Peter Figueredo, NETexponent CEO, brought a great deal of learning and knowledge to the table during the creation and launch process of the survey.  During his tenure at Nielsen Media Research as a Research Analyst Peter learned best practices for survey creation and data tabulation, just to name a few.  In addition to Peter and myself, Sal Conca, and Leslie Van Buren contributed a great deal of time and energy during various stages of the project.  Their expertise was definitely utilized to its fullest during this process.

Affiliate survey results will be available for the next 30 days FREE of charge at AffiliateBenchmarks. After the initial 30 days, the survey will be available for purchase for only $199.00  If there are any questions regarding the survey, please feel free to contact us.

Even luxury brands are promoting value. The current ads for BMW’s dealer group, for example, focus less on performance and prestige and more on safety and savings. The campaign reminds potential buyers that BMW offers a four-year no-cost maintenance plan.

“The message we feel is most in line with the times is reminding people about our value-for-money equation,” said Shawn Ticehurt, BMW North America’s marketing and events communications manager.

The team at NETexponent brainstormed this very topic a few weeks ago during one of our townhall meetings. We discussed how our clients could tailor their marketing messages so they appeal to the current consumer mindset. The team came up with some great ideas and here are just a few:

• iChapters.com offers students textbooks at a fraction of the cost- a key marketing message to be highlighted.  They also offer immediate gratification since they are downloadable textbooks. Focusing more on the savings compared to print and less on the immediate gratification should prove helpful.
• audible.com allows people to purchase downloadable audio books one at a time or through their subscription plans. The subscription plans allow consumers to purchase books at a significant savings off the cover price. This could prove to be a much greater value proposition than the convenience of the download or their vast selection of 50,000+ books.
• The Financial Times newspaper provides great world news coverage, not just financial news as the name may lead you to believe. In this market more and more people are looking for news about the world abroad for financial and political reasons. It’s also great to get a world view on the US to see how others view us. FT’s messaging could benefit from a focus on this value proposition perhaps even more than a focus on price. Timely news with a world perspective is very important in this crazy environment.
• Even The Wine Enthusiast can pitch themselves on value if they promote their clearance section more as well as selling their own brand of products which can be much cheaper than pricier alternatives.

I am sure that some of our affiliates can also find interesting ways to pitch our clients and I encourage everyone to think about how products and services can offer consumers value and/or savings.

This week, Google announced a couple of changes to the algorithm of their magical quality score.

1. Position Normalizers - You know that saying, “The rich get richer?” Well, Google, right before withdrawing from their deal to form an advertising partnership with rival Yahoo! and from being subjected to the scrutiny of the anti-trust system, wanted to combat this aphorism by removing the ad position biases because of CTR. What does this mean? Ads in higher positions typically have high click-through rates because they have high positions and have high positions because they have high click-through rates. Google wants to remove the circular reasoning behind this and award truly high quality ads with distinguished positioning.
2. Top Ad Placements - This one is confusing. According to Google, ads get placed according to their ad rank. It’s possible that the highest ad rank has a low quality score, which disqualifies the ad from the top of the page (yellow slots), which in turn, causes there to be no ads at all in this slot. OK? Take it as it is. The bottom line is that Google now allows ads with a lower ad rank and higher quality score to jump to the top spot. Got it? Cool.

For the full spiel on what Google portends are the guidelines for running higher quality search and content campaigns with added efficiency, check out their answer page to: What is ‘quality score’ and how is it calculated?

Relevancy in advertising may have spoiled us a little but not enough to do away with the power of persuasion. So what I usually tell clients is, yes, it’s absolutely worth trying. Not only is it worth trying, but if one tries hard enough, there is a great deal of high quality traffic to be attained.

Main Reasons Advertisers Lose Money on the Google Content Network:

1. Ads appear on irrelevant pages, which lead to bad clicks, which lead to low conversion rates.
2. The language in the ad does not divert the user’s attention from site content.
3. Initial setup is wrong. A content campaign should be its own campaign (or account), separate from search campaigns.

To expound on this last point, you want it to be separate for bidding and budget efficiency and so you get a more accurate click-through rate (CTR) for your campaigns. Because the overall reach of the Google Content Network is so large, you’ll usually have a low CTR, and you don’t want this number skewing the direction of your regular search campaigns. Some say there’s an additional advantage to having Google Content Network as a separate account, because one important factor for quality score is the overall click-through rate (CTR) of the entire account, and CTR from the content network will obviously bring that down. On their help page with content network optimization tips, Google claims this isn’t true and says: “The performance of your ads on content pages does not affect their performance on Google or on the search network.”

Things You Should Know About Keywords:

• Keywords in content ad groups need to describe the kinds of landing pages you want your ads to appear on.
• The keyword list should be words that appear most frequently on the kinds of pages you want to target.
• Use small tightly-themed ad groups with no more than 30-50 keywords. Even 10 keywords is fine.
• Only broad match is taken into account; there’s no need for exact and phrase matches.
• Keyword bids are irrelevant; bids go according to the ad group’s default (content) bid.
• Negative keywords are important and can be used to block unwanted traffic.

Things You Should Know About Ads:

• Ads need to distract users away from site content.
• Try using more competitive language and use words like “Free” in your ads whenever you can.
• Quality score for the Google Content Network is not as strict as regular search campaigns, so you can be more creative. Ads do not have to match keywords, though landing pages should still be relevant.
• Magic ad positions in Google Content Network are 1-4 while in search, it’s more like 1-2 and sometimes 1-3.
• Create separate ad groups for each media type in Google Content Network campaigns i.e. separate group for image ads.

Things You Should Know About Reporting:

• Run Placement Performance reports - these give stats on what specific sites perform well or under-perform in your content campaign.
• Use site exclusion to block sites on the Google Content Network that are costly and not performing well toward your goals.
• Try using Site Exclusion Tool to block categories of sites i.e. parked domains - although it’s still possible to convert on these types of sites.
• Run these reports every so often and try taking out the best sites and testing a site/placement targeting campaign.

A Great Tip When Running Site/Placement Targeting Campaigns:

• The Google site-finder is a flawed tool that does not give you all the sites you could be using.
• Right next to the link “Add Placements,” you’ll see another link, “Edit Placements and Bids.”
• Click this link, and paste domains (you find on your own) into the box that didn’t appear when using the site-finding tool.

Try Using Demographic Targeting:

• Most useful for sites that report demographic data, such as Youtube and Myspace.
• Example of usage: You can set it so your bids will be 120% for ages 18-25 who are of the male gender.
• Important: Using demographic targeting will not exclude other sites from displaying your ads; it just allows you to bid more/less for sites that have demographic features.

New Enhanced Site/Placement & Keyword Targeting Features:

• Google now allows you to couple groups of keywords with site-targets.
• In other words, you can choose sites you think will work well with your product, but can set it so ads will only show up if the keywords (or keyword mix) you chose are present on the page. This allows for additional targeting.

Whoever is reading this, I hope you find these tips helpful. Your comments, criticisms, along with any additional “tricks of the trade,” are all welcome.

This year’s contest winner was Cristina and her Dirty Martini Pumpkin - Congratulations Cristina! Enjoy your prize.

Everyone at NETexponent hopes you have a very happy halloween!

Marketing Sherpa produces a nifty search marketing report every year. In this year’s 2009 Search Marketing Benchmark Guide, they show you through an abundance of colorful charts how the flow of marketing dollars has increased year over year and will continue to increase by the billions in the coming years.

As far as the current state of the economy is concerned, market downturn will definitely affect search but not really damage it. Businesses are better informed than ever about the usefulness and efficiency of search marketing, and because of this, most search budgets are not likely to decrease during a recession.

I’d include specific numbers and stats, but I’m afraid of the those spooky copyright lawyers.