Looks like we are getting there, finally – The book I am co-authoring with Anne Kennedy is on Amazon and the date is set. The book is published by Que Biz-Tech and is called “Global Search Engine Marketing: Getting Better International Search Engine Results“. The description is as follows:

“For companies that operate internationally, English-only, U.S.-centric search programs leave far too many customers behind. Marketing through search engines to non-English-speaking customers outside North America has become essential, but it presents complex and unfamiliar challenges.

Now, for the first time, there’s a complete and practical guide to succeeding with global search marketing. In Global Search Engine Marketing, two leading experts bring together proven solutions to all the issues marketers will encounter – from culture and communication to technology and law. The authors cover all this, and much more:

” Understanding key cultural and behavioral differences, including the surprising local differences in how people search ” Crafting online marketing campaigns that reflect local cultures ” Selecting the right search media in each market – including markets where Google doesn’t dominate ” Achieving higher rankings in search engines around the world ” Organizing effective global pay-per-click search marketing campaigns ” Optimizing online press releases and other content for global search media ” Leveraging non-U.S. social media tools and platforms ” Optimizing mobile sites and apps for worldwide audiences ” Using web analytics to track key performance indicators (KPIs) in multilingual/multicultural campaigns – even if you don’t speak the language”

The popularity of Internet as a medium of communication and source of information has surged in the recent years and this has also affected the use of digital marketing to woo customers. Businesses today are using a variety of digital distribution channels to reach their customers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost effective manner. Direct emails, Facebook, Twitter, and the apps on smartphone and digital tablets are some of the channels in which brands are effectively connecting with customers.

Study by Yahoo! shows that digital marketing segment drew 15 billion Ducats in half of year in 2011. The global spending on digital advertising amounted to $14.9 billion in the first six months of 2011. This is 23 percent more than what was spent last the same period.

The use of social media has increased for marketing and the reasons are obvious. With more and more people joining the bandwagon on social networking sites everyday, marketers would not like to miss any opportunity to woo them before their competitors do. There were 225 million users of Twitter as per March 2011 reports and the current number of tweets per second is 1200. Facebook remains the most popular social media site with more than 750 million active users. When it comes to blogs on the Internet, 70 of the bloggers organically chirp about brands on their blogs. Naturally, the digital marketers want to advertise on these immensely popular social networking platforms. And now for the facts – the global ad revenues from social networks touched $5.54 billions and this will rise to $10 billion by the year 2013 as per a report on Tech Crunch.

Let us also check some of the digital marketing trends in the world of mobiles and smartphones. As per July 2011 data on Neilsen, more than 40 percent of the adult US mobile phone users specifically use smartphones. The figure is expected to cross the 50 percent mark by the end of year 2011. Businesses do not want to be left behind in the race to connect with their customers through these smartphones. As per a study by eMarketer, the total spending is expected to reach $1.23 billion by the end of year 2011. The year 2010 had witnessed a spending of $743 million and this year’s spending would be a 65 percent increase. The advertising amount typically includes the dollars spent on display ads, search ads and mobile video ads.

Marketing pros and advertisers have been traditionally reluctant to spend large amounts of their budgets on mobile advertising but recent trends indicate that resistance is diminishing. With the number of potential customers accessing the Internet through mobile devices steadily increasing, advertisers have started allocating more funds to mobile ads.

The reason for escalating budgets on advertising is not only due to the huge popularity of digital media. Another reason for which marketers prefer this mode is the ability to measure quick and often real time results of advertising. There are tools that let businesses know how often their ads are being clicked and what exactly attracts the attention of target audience.

Digital advertising indeed rocks – at least that’s what the stats portray!

I recently read a book about Quality Score entitled Quality Score in High Resolution by Craig Danuloff. The book really shed light upon the different factors that influence Quality Score calculations. This made me realize that there are currently an endless number of amature and professional blog posts that have created a lot of confusion in this area. This confusion appears to have led account managers, amatures and experts, to the conclusion that Quality Score is the enemy; however, this is not the case.

Quality Score is Google‘s way of helping the good and punishing the bad. It serves as a motivation for advertisers to create well organized and honest PPC campaigns, ensuring that there is more to online auctions than just over bidding.

Look at it this way, Quality Score is Google‘s way of telling you whether or not you should be advertising under a specific keyword. If you feel that a keyword should not be receiving a low Quality Score and it is totally relevant to your campaign – and you are certain that you don‘t have any landing page penalties –  then it is most likely your campaign. By improving your ad texts, optimizing or switching your chosen landing page, upping the bids, or organizing your campaigns from scratch etc., you are well on the way to improving your initial Quality Scores.

There are many factors taken in the equation of Quality Score calculation and almost all of them are invisible. The only Quality Score metric that is visible to advertisers is the column we see in Google Adwords, which serves as more of a guideline than an actual rule – an approximation if you will. The “real“ Quality Score is calculated every time a user enters a search query that is identical to any one of the keywords within your keyword list.

Among factors that influence Quality Score calculations are ad rank, ad text quality score, account quality score, landing page quality score, and most importantly, relevance and click-through-rate.

According to Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, these last two factors play the biggest role in Quality Score calculation. In other words, in order to achieve higher Quality Scores in your account, making you eligable for auctions that Google deems more likely to convert, you need to optimize your account towards small, tightly themed ad-groups that make your keyword selection within a specific ad-group match your ad-texts and landing page. This is a great tactic to boost your click-through-rates which in return increases your chances of conversion. This is of course assuming that your landing page fits Google‘s standards and if so, most importantly, the searchers needs.

The bottom line is that Quality Score ensures that you as a honest advertiser within the Google channels have an equal chance of success in the big league. Google wants to rule out those with foul intentions, giving the searchers the most relevant ads as possible. This should serve as a driving force for you to optimize your campaigns towards success, which will again increase your chances of conversion.

Remember

• Build tightly focused ad-groups with ad texts that match your keyword selection
• Instead of having 1 ad-group with 1000 keywords, try to break it down to 10 ad-groups with 100 keywords
• Choose a landing page that gives the searchers exactly what they expected from the ad text
  - Having said that, write ad texts that are straight to the point, limiting the risk of irrelevant clicks, and don‘t promise anything you can‘t deliver
• Take your time, building up a successful PPC campaign takes time, start with a strong core and slowly implement changes

Haukur Jarl Kristjánsson – Nordic eMarketing @haukurjarl

I was reading an interesting article the other day on why companies advertise their own brand items when they are already ranked no.1 for those items. It is during the course of my reading that I finally got some insight on whether paid search advertisements cannibalize traffic from their corresponding organic listings for the very same keywords.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the relationship between organic search and paid search is grossly misunderstood by SEO professionals. There are times when companies are on the top of both paid as well as organic listings and there really is a symbiosis between the two marketing channels. It is interesting to note that the click through rate of a top ranking organic listing can be increased if you have a corresponding sponsored advertisement placed on top of it or to its right. By showing up twice on the very same page, the top ranking does get twice the number of clicks it would get either for organic or for paid listings alone! Any eyebrows rising on negative synergy between the two would be null and void.

Truth is, organic and paid searches do interact. However, in most cases flawed attribution modelling misinterpret returns on investment by associating conversions or sales with the wrong Internet marketing program.

Whether PPC is cannibalizing organic searches can be answered by a simple illustration. In a multi-touch situation, a visitor may visit a website through an organic listing but may exit without amounting in any conversions (that is without buying anything). A few days later, the same visitor visits the same website through a paid listing. Only this time, he buys something too. If you assign 100% value to the transaction on the last click, paid listing or PPC would obviously get the credit. In an alternate scenario, where you attach the entire value to the first click where the visitor entered through a natural link, the organic listing gets all the credit for its heavy lifting.

Such attribution inaccuracies make PPC appear as if it cannibalizes or pulls searchers away from organic listings, which could have otherwise been clicked. A highly paid PPC creative declaring it to be the ‘official website’ is the best example that illustrates this thought.

Attributing a certain amount of the overall value to all touch points with greater importance to the first click will ideally create a win-win situation for both PPC and organic click, leaving neither to be overshadowed by the other.

The return on investment in the case of PPC is further magnified as the URLs in paid searches are tagged with tracking parameters, whether or not the user interacts with a paid listing in the buying cycle. The URLs in organic listings are not tagged since this is considered to be a bad SEO practice, which leads to content duplicity or PageRank dilution.

A lethal combination of high organic ranking, a very strong brand and very similar organic and paid listings differentiated from competitors pave the way for conflict and ‘cannibalism’.

So, what are the best practices that an SEO professional can implement?
- Get better idea of the actual ROI derived from organic search, at the keyword level.
- Ask your PPC counterpart to reduce his CPC on keywords that have high conversion rates and high paid cost by almost 60%, while still retaining the ad.
- Test calls-to-action displayed on the ‘official site’ of your paid search and measure the impact on the synergy.

These steps will not only help a company to optimize its ads and rebalance its paid search expenditure based on actual ROI where synergy is duly taken into account but also clear all doubts about PPC cannibalizing organic searches.

Haukur Jarl – PPC Nordic eMarketing

Sometimes you see strangest things on Google,like the screen shots I am showing here. When searching Iceland news on Google I found some good sites but in the advertising column Google was as they often do suggesting related results. In this case some material on Japan, the similarity between Iceland and Japan is however not much. We both like Whale meat and both countries are Islands.

We are used to Google confusing Iceland to Ireland, but Japan (personally I love the country) that is a stretch.

Five Ways to Avoid Norwegian Prayer Syndrome

1. Make sure your content is relevant to your ad (ie. Are you  speaking the same language literally and figuratively on your site as in  your ad?)

2. Use your keywords on the page when possible

3. Keep your keywords in the main content of the page when using them

4. Make sure your page loads quickly

5. Show signs of trust on the landing page

What is it, this Norwegian Prayer Syndrom (or problem as some would call it)

Read about it here

An article by me was publised last Februar in the annual Baidu Magazine. The article was written in cooperation with Baidu’s marketing team and the SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Organization) were I am on the board of directors. The idea behind the article was to give Chinese marketers an insight into the markets out side of China and how the Internet with focus on search and display was developing.

Successful Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference 2011 over. We had close to 300 guests from some 10 countries and they got see some great speakers from Facebook, YouTube, Bing, Wall Street Journal, SAP, Hotels.com, Boats.com, First House and Icelandair to name few. See you next year at RIMC 2012.

Google Translate is fantastic and ever developing service provided by Google. My staff sometimes finds things that are to say the least strange. This is one is a good sample; when you translate from English to Icelandic the “words” Lalalalala (five times) Google will translate it as Bjork, the famous Icelandic singer. Not sure where they pull this from (maybe some funny Icelanders contributing and having fun while they are at it), but being an Icelander I can say for sure Lalalalala does not translate Björk.

A short introduction to the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference held in Iceland every year. This year there are speakers from Facebook, Bing, Hotels.com, Wall Street Journal, Icelandair, AOL, SAP, Boats.com YouTube and more.

For more information about the Conference go to www.rimc.is/en/