Cameron Gibbs

If you had access to a computer and the internet a couple of years ago, you probably saw the numa numa video.  Well, the other day I was checking out the featured videos on youtube and I noticed that one of the related videos had an image of a guy that reminded me of the numa numa dude.  I clicked on it and sure enough, it was Mr. Numa Numa himself.  A few months ago he and his band (yes, he actually has a band), along with the help of Experience Studios, created a new music video called New Numa (this time, the song is in Russian and it was specifcally created for the video but not played by numa numa dude’s band).

Though the video is hilarious and the song is kind of catchy (but kind of annoying after awhile), it’s not what I’m pointing out in this post.  What’s cool is what one company is doing with the numa numa craze to make a profit.  You’ll notice as you’re watching the new numa video, the numa numa guy is wearing a shirt that says newnuma.com on it and he’s wearing a wireless bluetooth headset (the icombi).  If you go to newnuma.com, you’ll see an advertisement for a new numa video contest.  Wiresaremessy.com, a site that only sells the icombi, is sponsering the contest and giving away big cash prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place (the winner receives $25k). 

Though it’s quite a gamble, I think its really cool marketing to sponsor a world wide video contest like this and promote/sell a product that fits the demographic like a shoe.  Hopefully, for wiresaremessy.com’s sake, the gamble pays off.

A while back I read about a site that’s able to match up pictures of your ancestors with pics that others have uploaded through face recognition software.  The site has a fun tool that tells you which celeb you look most like.  Heidi and I have had a lot of fun uploading pictures of our boys and other family members to see which celebrity we most resemble.

Though the tool doesn’t really add any value to the site’s products, it’s been incredible linkbait, improving the site’s organic rankings, driving tons of traffic and has certainly increased revenues.

Apperantly, our six-month old boy looks like Oprah.

Omniture recently acquired Instadia, a leading, profitable web analytics provider in Europe.  Since November, Omniture’s stock price has skyrocketed from around $10 a share to $15 and analysts are screaming buy.

Investors: keep an eye on OMTR. Competitors: beware – they’ve got some serious capital and will likely continue to pump out powerful analytical tools.

This tip actually applies to traffic from any channel but its definitely something you can do to improve your return on ad spend and justify your cost-per-conversion for ppc ads.

Before killing a costly adgroup, make sure you’ve offered everything searchers may be looking for when they click on your ad.  For example, try selling different variations of your product… different colors, different lengths, different brands, etc.  If you’re only offering one or two varieties of a product, a searcher will be more likely to go with a competitor that offers a more depth product line.

If sales to businesses make up a majority of your revenue, you may want to consider reducing your max cpc outside of business hours.  Allow me to explain…

Say you have a product that you make $10 profit per sale and businesses buy five of them on average while consumers only buy one unit at a time.  See where I’m going?  With businesses, you’re probably making a decent profit when you’re spending less than $40 on advertising per conversion (hopefully much less to cover your other expenses) but with consumers, you don’t have as much room for advertising after your other expenses (overhead and operations).

This logic mostly applies to advertisers that sell to both business and consumers.  If your product is only searched for by businesses, then you don’t have to worry about the advertising bill being run up outside of business hours.

From a single keyword, its very easy to generate an incredibly long list of keywords… synonyms, plurals, misspellings, broad matches, phrase matches, exact matches, etc. Keep in mind the costs associated to managing so much data. When the data becomes spread over so many keywords, it becomes difficult to analyze and interpret… which keywords are working, which ones aren’t, which one have a max cpc that needs to be adjusted, etc.

I was once analyzing keywords that generated thousands of dollars of clicks over several months that didn’t lead to a single sale. At first glance, I was shocked… but then I realized that the ads would have showed up for those keywords even if I hadn’t been bidding on them because I was bidding on the broad match version of the keyword at a slightly lower price (which keyword wasn’t doing bad). Moral of the story… long lists of keywords are just spreading the data thin (impressions, clicks, ctr’s, conversions, etc) making them difficult to manage.

On the flip side, Google doesn’t always show ads for synonyms and misspellings so make sure you do include them.

Within the adgroups, be sure to take advantage of the exact and phrase matching — searchers typing the exact same keywords are looking exactly what you’ve got. Since exact matches are the most targeted forms of keywords (i.e. they have the highest conversion rate), they are the most valuable so you’ll want to set a max cpc higher than broad matching. Phrase matching is also more targeted than broad so it should also be set higher than broad’s max cpc but lower than exact match’s… it just makes sense.

If you don’t have a huge product line and/or its worth the time, you may even want to create separate adgroups for each type of keyword (broad, phrase, and exact) in order to more easily manage them since they will each have a different max cpc.

Ok, this is another really obvious tip but it can’t be stressed enough. There are a number of reasons why you want to have targeted adgroups. I will explain how to create targeted adgroups and what the benefits are to doing so.

First, take your entire product line and divide it up into as few main groups as possible… each of these groups will be a campaign in google. Next, create an adgroup not only for every product, but for every keyword family. A keyword family is a group of keywords that for the most part, are just a variation of one keyword (word or phrase). For example, if you sell widgets in various forms, don’t create one adgroup for all of your widgets. Instead break your widgets down by how they are searched for such as blue widget, widget extender, or microsoft widget. By doing this, you can create an ad that contains the exact keywords the searcher is using. Both the searcher and adwords like this and you will be rewarded with a good CTR and quality score. There is a way to show the searchers exact query in your ad, but searchers have figured out that advertisers that use this technique don’t really have what they’re looking for.

Another benefit to targeted adgroups is keyword management. You’ll find that some keywords for a product merit a higher max cpc while other keywords for the same product don’t. It’s difficult to manage adgroups that have several keywords with different max cpc’s and when you’re running your adgroup reports, each keyword in an adgroup that has a max cpc that is different than the default cpc shows up on a separate line, making management of those adgroups confusing.

It’s been said that there are two sure things in life: death and taxes. Well, there’s one more, regular updates to search engine algorithms.

Search engines regulary update algorithms (google 3 or 4 times a year) to improve the results and fix weaknesses exploited. If you want your site to get to the top of the results and keep it there, its important to keep informed on SEO. One of the best ways to do this is to read blogs from notable SEO’s. Here’s a few I highly recommend: SEO Book, seomoz.org, Matt Cutts, and searchenginewatch.

There’s a saying amoung SEO’s that “content is king.” The more content you have, the more content google (or any other searh engine) has to match up queries to. The more unique content you have, the more valuable you become to google and more importantly, google users. Google actually avoids indexing pages that have the same content as pages already indexed.

Take wikipedia for example. When was the last time you did a search and wikipedia wasn’t one of the first results? It’s been awhile for me. Just about every page in wikipedia is full of informative, unique content.