idaconcpts » Online Marketing

The Anatomy of the Long Tail Search

Guest Blogger — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:24:05 +0000

This is a guest post by Ben Hook, a search engine marketer and owner of UK based online marketing company, Navaro.

Udi Manber, Google’s VP of Engineering’s comment that approximately 20 – 25% of searches performed each day are completely new queries helps to highlight the increasing need to understand how your customers are going to be looking for your products or services on the long tail of searches.

Keyword research is essential to any search engine optimization campaign. It helps ensure the time and effort put in to attain those high rankings pays off with an increase in the amount of conversions received. The main focus of keyword research though, is to highlight the most rewarding keywords to focus on in terms of traffic driven, a job they do to the best of their ability.

The Long Tail Search

With 2 billion searches a day this results in 250 million new queries. This works out at 182.5 billion new, never before searched queries a year. This is rough maths and there’s probably other factors to take into account but you get the point. You can bet the majority of these keywords are going to be variations of previous searches and more likely than not will have four or more words in the query. You can also be pretty sure that the most important keywords e.g. the product name will be included within these four words.

The trick to capturing these new queries and making sure you get ranked is to picture the way that your potential customers will be looking for your product or service. For example, if you sell scissors you will most likely want to be showing up on long tail searches such as “where can I buy cheap scissors” and lots of variations on this theme.

Capturing the Long Tail Search

To make sure you are optimized for these sorts of queries we need to break it down. Most long tail search queries can be broken into two parts, being variables and the constants, in this case “where can I buy” and “cheap scissors”.

The “where can I buy” is an example of a variable in the search, the part which will change each time to create these new queries. We can ignore this for now, as this will change constantly resulting in too many variations to realistically target.

The constant in this example is the “cheap scissors”. This is your product of service, your core offering that doesn’t change despite what is put either side of it. It is important to note that if your scissors aren’t cheap this process still applies but the constant in this equation would be just “scissors” : )

By keeping the “on page” focus on the constant you can optimize well for the core phrases. Ideally the variables will be optimized for via anchor text which will help to strengthen and increase the rankings on the long tail terms. The trick is understanding and recognizing the constant for your product and not targeting a constant that is too long or short.

Conclusion

The variables are the unknown queries, the string of words that appear fleetingly and are never searched again. Owning the constant is the trick to capturing these long tail searches.

What Online Marketers Can Learn from Online Educators

Damian Davila — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:04:09 +0000

A MBA degree is a highly coveted degree for online marketing practitioners because it backs up our professional practice. However, throughout our MBA education we are hardly exposed to a field that is very relevant to our practice: online education, also known as educational technology.

The field of Educational Technology (ET) explores the potential use and impact of learning technologies in a variety of contexts, and determines good practices of curriculum design and technology integration.

Educational technology programs such as the Master of Educational Technology at the University of British Columbia provide learning opportunities in:

Teaching/Instruction using Learning Technologies
Planning and Management of Learning Technologies
Design and Development of Learning Technologies

How does educational technology relate to online marketing?

Effective teaching with technology draws on

current research and best practice to show how to integrate technology into teaching.

The field of educational technology provides several decision model for selecting appropriate technologies for teaching in various education scenarios.

In simple words: online educators are always looking for best practices to optimize the online learning experience (a.k.a. online engagement).

Optimize online engagement. Now there are 3 words that ANY online marketer is always looking for.

An example of a decision model

A book that stands out in the field of educational technology is Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education by Bates and Poole (2003). From this book, one great decision model that summarizes key factors to consider when designing and analyzing the implementation of technology education in any kind of learning-teaching experience is the SECTIONS model.

The elements of the SECTIONS model are (Bates and Poole, 2003):

Students: The reality of the students, their social and economical context. Also, it is important to take into account their access to technology and speed of internet connection.

Ease to use: The educational technology needs to be easy to use both for students and teachers. The software and hardware needs to end-user oriented rather than designer oriented.

Costs: Whatever costs have to be taken into accounted to implement the educational technology. This includes, but are not limited to: a) initial investment, b) production costs, c) maintenance costs, d) training of personnel and e) updating costs.

Teaching and learning: The technology must match the key elements and ideas of the teaching-learning experience to be implemented in the course.

Interactivity: According to Bates and Poole (2003) there are two kinds of interaction, one consists of individual interactions of the individual with the course material and the second consists of social interactions between two or more individuals about the course material (p. 99). Most educational technologies need to provide both experiences so that students are able to fully develop their metacogntive abilities. Also, another important interaction to consider is the interaction between instructor and student.

Organizational Issues: The appropriate authorities (i.e. school district, school director, parents, etc) must approve the use of the technology, especially if minors are going to have access to it.

Novelty: The key to create intrinsic motivation in students. The use of the technology must cause satisfaction not pain to the student!

Speed: The technology must reflect the reality of the context of the student. The use of multimedia is awesome…only if the students have appropriate bandwidth.

Conclusion

Just replace student for customer and you have 8 key considerations when planning any online marketing campaign.

How to target your audience using Facebook Pages

Damian Davila — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:41:50 +0000

Welcome back!

Back in January 2009, I ran a post about Facebook Ads because I believe this is a great online marketing tool. This post was titled “How to target your audience using Facebook Advertising” and it touched on how to get started with an online ad.

At the end of February 2009, Facebook launched Pages as a way to allow businesses and brands to strengthen their online image on Facebook and increase the potential interaction with Facebook users.

Screenshot of the editing view of a Facebook Page

A Facebook Page looks very much like a regular Facebook Profile and there are several organizations and business that have one.

For example, here’s the AT&T Facebook Page:

…and here’s the Facebook Page from my MBA school, the Shidler College of Business:

The difference between a regular Facebook profile and a Facebook Page is that instead of becoming a friend of a brand/organization/company, you become a fan. A well-thought feature is that brand/organization/company CANNOT add friends. This is a great practice of permission marketing because it forces users to really think whether they want to become a “fan” or not of a brand/organization/company. Therefore, the “fan” gives permission to the brand/organization/company to contact him or her, making communications personal, relevant and anticipated (the 3 pillars of permission marketing).

This is all fine, but why is the title of this post called “How to target your audience using Facebook Pages”? The answer is: Facebook Pages gives you key insights into the gender and age range of your fans. Yes, there are other nice features like number of pageviews, comments, video views and more, but the key insight is gender and age. Below is a screenshot of Facebook Pages Insight:

Having the age range and gender of your bulk of fans will allow you to tweak your Facebook Advertising campaign.

Thank you for your time and best of luck in your permission marketing campaigns!

How to target your audience using Facebook Ads

Damian Davila — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:40:53 +0000

For the last week, I have been pretty busy creating and tweaking online ads at Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, so I thought it would be useful to provide a bit of advice from my personal experience using Facebook Ads.

Why did I choose Facebook Ads? Consider the following bar graph from Venture Beat’s article titled Facebook’s traffic growth leaving rivals in the dust.

For simplicity, I will assume that you want to drive visitors to a single website.

Do your research: You cannot expect Facebook Ads to do miracles for you. It will do a pretty decent job at providing impressions but the “clickability” of your ad is 100% up to you. Forget one-size-fits-all approaches, you will require to develop at least 5 ads (I am currently working with 8). You need to think about the profiles of your website visitors. For a quick video tutorial of this idea, take the quick tour of the web attitudinal web analytics firm iPerceptions from Canada. (Avinash Kaushik is on their Advisory Council, so yes, you have to listen). Is your ad audience: female? male? young? old? English speaking? Time-constrained? Etc, etc, etc. Preparation of audience profiles should be about 60% of your time dedicated to develop online ads.
Select your text and image for your ad: As you can see from the two ads below, you can have a subject line of 25 characters, text of 135 characters, and you can upload an image (there are appear no limits on the image file size because Facebook will resize it to fit the add). It is important that you have a variety of images available because you will be needing as you A/B test your ads. Notice that Facebook users can give your ad a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to your ad! Don’t try to fully capitalize words (e.g. FREE), or use strange characters (keep to the regular alphabet, both using different languages is ok, actually I encourage it!). Remember to use proper punctuation, otherwise your ad won’t be approved.
Think of the keyword(s) of your ad: This step is critical because it will allow you to use SEO and SEM tools such as Google Trends. Let’s assume that you want to promote your great widgets at www.widgets.com. So an important keyword to consider would be “widgets”. Let’s check out what is the search volume index of “widgets” at Google Trends. Wow, this is a lot of useful information! Notice that we get a couple of relevant news that show what drove queries for this term. Company names and product names are useful because then you can go into their websites and see what are their current SEO and SEM practices. Also, you should look if the already have ads around Facebook. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel and keep an eye on the current practices of your competitors. It is also important to check out what keywords are related to your keyword, what regions (or countries or cities) provide the most queries for your keyword, and what languages are those queries made on. Another important source of information is Google Ad Planner. For a discussion on how to use Google Ad Planner, refer to this web analytics analysis of Flickr, Photobucket, Shutterlfly, Snapfish, and Slide using Google Ad Planner.
Reach the (exact) audience you want: Using the information from the previous steps, you can fill in the fields on step 3. Notice that not all keywords are available at Facebook, so its important that you look for keywords related to your own keyword(s) of choice.
Price your ad: I will skip this step for now, because it deserves a whole post of its own. If this is your first time creating Facebook ads, then I would recommend setting the price towards the lower limit and setting a total budget for 1 month. Keep track of your A/B testing and then you will have enough information to develop a more detailed pricing strategy.

That’s it for now and happy experimenting with Facebook Ads!