Since the advent of paid search engine marketing, click fraud has been a growing area of concern for search engine marketers. Estimates of the scope of click fraud vary from 10% to 35% of all click activity. If not detected, click fraud can rob your company of both your marketing dollars and your sales. Are your campaigns safe? This article provides some tips on how to detect click fraud in your campaigns and some guidance on what to do if you find it.
Tag Archive for 'sem'
Click Fraud: Are Your Campaigns Safe?
Published by May 1st, 2007 in Search Marketing, SEM, Google, PPC, Adsense, Search Matters, Newsletter and Click Fraud. 0 Comments
Ambivalence for DTC ads: Can search help?
Published by April 27th, 2007 in SEM, Healthcare, Pharma and DTC. 0 CommentsPharmaceutical Executive had a very interesting article on a series of studies conducted for the Pharmaceutical Safety Institute on DTC ads and consumers. The data revealed that despite ads prompting consumers to take action, either by searching online or discussing the product with their doctors, nearly half of respondents find DTC ads uninformative or inaccurate.
As the search marketing manager for several large pharmaceutical brands with largely funded DTC campaigns, I speak with the brand teams regularly about the importance of establishing a comprehensive SEM strategy. An SEM strategy is needed to make sure that not only is the brand ready and highly visible online for those consumers that are prompted by DTC ads to go to the web, BUT also to fill the increasing void as more consumers turn to the web for their healthcare information, because they are becoming less trusting of pharma’s DTC ads. Additionally, it is important to remember that often times, the “language” used within a DTC ad (which can be impacted heavily by trademark or regulatory requirements) can be quite different from how consumers are thinking about or searching for healthcare information online (think “ED vs. impotence“, so you need to be prepared for the unexpected!
SEM Has Become Mainstream
Published by April 24th, 2007 in Search Marketing, SEM, Paid Search, PPC and Search Matters. 0 CommentsI’m not sure exactly when it happened but it happened. Search engine marketing has become mainstream. Businesses of all sizes no longer debate whether or not they need to do search engine marketing, the debate has become: “Do we do it in-house or do we hire an experienced SEM agency.”
Not long ago, many businesses who were jumping on the SEM band wagon decided the SEO component of SEM required technical expertise that they did not have internally, so it was a fairly easy decision to farm that piece out to an experienced SEO firm. Conversely, many companies felt they could manage the paid search component in-house since it was a fairly straightforward process in that you could completely control your rankings simply by outbidding your competitors.
The SEM world is now a very different place. If you are considering the option of managing your campaign in-house, make sure you know what you are getting into. Mistakes will cost you in terms of rankings and revenue, and you can quickly burn through your SEM budget.
On the organic side of SEM, gone are the days of doorway pages, invisible text, and other black hat short cuts to success. Competition for the top spots is stronger than ever and the search engines have strict rules about how you can optimize your site to improve rankings.
Optimizing your paid search engine marketing campaign has also become very sophisticated. Paid search engine marketers need to have in depth knowledge of the search engine tools and features. The days of controlling your ranking based solely on your bid are over. Nowadays, your quality score is at least as important as your bids. Keyphrase relevancy, click-through rate, ad quality, landing page quality, and site quality are all factors that impact your ranking and the amount you pay per click. It may not be rocket science but its getting there. Furthermore each search engine has its own unique algorithm for ranking paid search ads, unique rules for writing ads, different match type options, different methods for handling plurals and mis-spellings, different demographics and psychographics, and well you get the idea. Its not as easy as it used to be. And oh yeah, the rules and tools are constantly changing.
Just remember, at the end of the day it all comes down to your return on investment. Good search engine marketing not only requires good technical and marketing skills, it requires good business skills. Do you have what it takes?
Exploiting Site-Internal Search Systems for SEM
Published by April 24th, 2007 in Search Marketing, SEM, Paid Search, CPC, PPC and Local Search. 0 CommentsMany of our clients’ sites have internal search features, which allow visitors to the site to search for information within the site, such as a “Find a {Doctor/Center/Office/Event/Course/Dealership/etc.} Near You” feature. This type of internal search is powered by a searchable database, and the URLs of search results pages in this system are dynamically generated. With all the possible permutations of different parameters, this can add up to thousands of possible URLs. However, we have recently been developing tools for using the internal search results pages as landing pages for sponsored search ads. This is a unique way to take users directly to the page that is most relevant to them.
Suppose you have internal search on your site. Your brand, Acme Dialysis, is trying to help people find kidney dialysis centers near them. Assuming the user’s first stop is a typical search engine like Google, where they type in, for example, “Dialysis centers in Chicago”. You have a search results page on your site that contains a list of all your dialysis centers near Cleveland. But how do you serve an ad on Google’s search results page that links people to your internal search results page for Chicago?
The answer is that those long, complex, and often intimidating URLs of internal search results pages are actually quite systematic. By tapping into this systematic URL structure, we can generate super-targeted keyphrases and ads, so that when someone types in:
“Dialysis centers in Chicago”
They see an ad that says:
Chicago Dialysis Center
Visit Acme Dialysis Center Located
Near You in Chicago.
www.Acme-Dialysis-Centers.com
And they are then taken to page on the site as though they had just searched your internal database for centers in Chicago. It is possible to do this for hundreds of locations at a time, as well as for multiple products. The end results is a campaign with thousands of keywords, each of which has a highly targeted specific ad, and each of which takes users to exactly what they wanted on your site.
Major e-commerce retailers have long used this tactic. For example, if you search for an ordinary product and click on an eBay ad, you will be taken to the same page as if you had searched within eBay for that product. As brand marketers’ sites become more integral to their business, they should consider integrating this type sophistication into their paid search campaigns as well.
Search Matters Weekly Search Links 4/18/2007
Published by April 18th, 2007 in SEO, SEM, Google, Search Engines, Ask, Search News and Linking. 0 CommentsGoogle Bombing, Wikipedia vandalism and the future of Google search are making the top headlines this week.
- Is Stephen Colbert the Greatest Living American? You decide. (SEOmoz)
- Now that Google is an advertising giant, will search get abandoned and/or outsourced? (Gord)
- Search for regulated industries? Who knew? (Catalyst Blog)
- Want to know how far you walked after dinner last night and if you burned enough calories to account for the creme brulee? Try Google Maps Pedometer. (Gmaps Pedometer)
- Channel Partner B2B search marketing tactics (Search Engine Land)
- Wikipedia seeks to bar submissions for “The Office” because of wiki-vandalism. (Yahoo News)
- Ask.com CEO explains “the alogorithm” and why it keeps finding Jesus. (SEW)
Online Video for Healthcare Companies
Published by April 3rd, 2007 in SEO, SEM, Video Search, Healthcare, Search Engines, Social Media, Pharma and Newsletter. 0 CommentsSince the DTC advertising took-off ten years ago, pharmaceutical companies have been aware of the persuasive power of video. TV commercials have brought an unprecedented degree of awareness to mass audiences, and have brought depth and dimension to products that would otherwise be difficult to explain. Now that opportunity is expanding to include online video. Online video resembles television in many ways:
- It is currently dominated by entertainment content.
- Thanks to the widespread adoption of broadband, viewership can often be measured in millions (although there’s no “broadcast” - so that viewership builds-up over time.)
- Word of mouth (and its e-mail/IM equivalents) can launch a video into the spotlight.
Healthcare companies can use these similarities to reach out to online audiences by purchasing pre-roll commercials at popular portal sites. These are displayed at the start of a video clip, and often accommodate a standard 15-second format.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Greater gains can be had by leveraging the non-TV attributes of online video: Continue reading ‘Online Video for Healthcare Companies’
What is Social Media Optimization?
Published by November 22nd, 2006 in Search Marketing, SEO, SEM, Organic Search, Search Engines, Blogs, Social Media, Yahoo, MSN, Personalized Search, SEO Best Practices and Newsletter. 0 CommentsSocial Media Optimization is a concept that is making its way into mainstream marketing publications. Social Media Optimization or SMO is a concept coined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. In his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization, Rohit explains that:
“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”
Social Media Demographics
A common misconception about popular social network sites like MySpace, is that they are the domains of the teens and preteens. A recent comScore study found that as MySpace and the social networks grow and become more mainstream, the demographics change as their reach extends into a greater part of the population.
Can Your Potential Patients Find You?
Published by January 15th, 2006 in Search Marketing, SEO, SEM, Paid Search, Google, Search Engines, SEO Best Practices and Newsletter. 0 CommentsLocation, location, location is as important on the Internet as it is in real estate. Why spend time, resources, and money to develop a website that your audience can�t find?
All too often businesses invest a significant amount of time, money, and resources building impressive websites and then do little to promote them to drive the traffic. They just assume if they build it, visitors will come. Nothing could be further from the truth as competition for eyeballs increases daily across the Internet. For example, a Google search on the disease multiple sclerosis yields more than 16 million results and that number is increasing constantly. So anyone launching a new site on multiple sclerosis, or any subject area for that matter, instantly has a mountain of competition for attracting visitors. Fortunately there are ways to leap frog the competition and attract visitors quickly. How? The answer is to be in the right location.
