Ten Tips for Law Firm Search Engine Marketing

In an era where consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet to research local services, and where the yellow pages is increasingly used for fireplace kindling, savvy lawyers now realize that any effective marketing strategy must have a significant online component. With that in mind, I give you my ten tips for marketing your law firm via paid search advertising on the search engines.

Note, just to be clear, I am only talking about paid search (also known as pay per click advertising, PPC advertising, search engine marketing, or SEM!) – I am not talking about organic search engine optimization (also known as SEO, natural search, or algorithmic search!). For those of you who want to learn about SEO, I highly recommend the folks at Justia.com – the world experts on law firm SEO.

1. Avoid Vanity. In the world of yellow pages advertising, having a full-color advertisement on the back of the yellow pages is the prime placement for a law firm. After all, it ensures that virtually anyone who picks up the book – whether they are currently looking for a lawyer or not – will see your smiling face. In search engine marketing (SEM), the equivalent is the “top listing” on Google – that is, the first highlighted paid link at the top of the page.

Depending on the geographic location of your law practice and your practice area, the top link will generally cost you from $3 to upwards of $25 – per click! Think about that for a moment; let’s say you are a New York City personal injury lawyer. If you want to be in #1 position, you can probably expect to pay $25 a click for 300 to 400 clicks a day. That’s around $7500 a day, or $2.7 million a year!

Now I’m sure there are some law firms that can afford this much expense to buy a single keyword, but the question is: are they buying this keyword so they can ‘one-up’ other law firms and stroke their ego, or are they buying this keyword because it makes them profitable? Let’s face it, a law firm is a business, and all business is competitive. If you make bad marketing decisions (unprofitable marketing decisions), and your competitive makes profitable marketing decisions, over time your business will suffer and your competitors will prosper.

As a result, any keyword that you buy via SEM must be measurably profitable or you simply shouldn’t buy it. That doesn’t mean you can’t try to buy “New York City personal injury lawyer” for $25 per click. But after a week of testing (and thousands of dollars of cost), if you aren’t seeing new clients come in the door as a result of this keyword, you need to reduce your bid or shut it down entirely.

Yes, it may hurt your ego to see your big competitor buying the #1 position on Google, but it will hurt his ego a lot more when he needs to contact a bankruptcy lawyer when he can no longer pay his bills! So rule #1: buy keywords based on measurable logic, not based on what your heart wants you to do!

2. Track Everything. Very closely related to “Avoid Vanity.” In order to make sure that your SEM campaigns are making your firm money, you need to do everything in your power to track the return on investment (ROI) of your SEM campaigns. One of the biggest differences between an SEM campaign and a yellow pages campaign is that with SEM you have a tremendous amount of quantifiable information available to you.

With the yellow pages, the best you can do is to put something in your ad that says “Please mention you saw our yellow pages ad” and then ask your receptionist to ask callers how they heard about your firm. With SEM, however, you can determine which keyword resulted in a submission of a ‘contact us’ form, how much you paid for the keyword, what time the keyword was clicked, what advertisement they clicked on, and even the geographic location of the user!

The biggest differentiator between successful SEM campaigns and failed campaigns is the degree to which the advertiser tracks ROI. An SEM campaign with tracking implemented enables you to spend more money on keywords that drive conversions and reduce bids or pause keywords that don’t. To learn more about a simple online tracking solution, check out the Google Conversion Tracker.

3. Geo-target. Imagine what would happen if your Chicago divorce law firm started getting calls from potential clients in Idaho and Hawaii. First of all, your administrative staff would have to waste a lot of time fielding calls from people you couldn’t help. Second, if you were paying money for these clicks via SEM, you would be wasting a lot of money.

Fortunately, the search engines have created tools that enable you to restrict the range of your advertisements to your locality. Indeed, on Google, you can target your advertising to your specific country, state, city, or even zip code.

For some practice areas, it might make sense to target the entire country (example: mesothelioma lawyer), and for others, you might want to have a radius of no more than 10 or 15 miles from your office (example: divorce lawyer). Either way, if you don’t make a conscious decision about the geographic location from which you want to receive clicks, you will likely cost yourself a lot of money. You can learn more about geo-targeting here.

4. Provide Multiple Contact Options. Everyone is different. Some people want to immediately call a lawyer and schedule a meeting ASAP. Other people don’t like talking on the phone right away and would rather submit a “contact us” form online instead. When you design your Web site, you need to make certain that you have different contact options for different people.

Keep in mind that every time you get a click from an SEM campaign, you pay for that click regardless of whether the person who clicked ends up signing up as a client. Hence, if you don’t do everything you can to get them to contact you after the click, you are basically costing yourself money.

5. Prompt Your Receptionist. Previously I noted that the only way to measure the ROI of yellow pages advertisements was to tell your administrative staff to ask callers “where they heard about us.” The same applies to your SEM campaigns. If someone calls in and says that they “saw your ad on Google,” try to get your receptionist to probe a little deeper. For example, “do you remember what word or phrase you searched for?” and “did you click on one of the ads at the top or on the right of the page, or did you click on one of the regular results?”

This is not a perfect science, as your receptionist might frequently forget to ask these questions, and most Internet users don’t really understand the difference between a paid result and a natural result. But every bit of information counts. Remember that $2.7 million annual cost for buying “New York City personal injury lawyer?” If one phone call came in from that campaign and resulted in a $10 million verdict, that could justify purchasing that keyword. But if you don’t connect the keyword to the lucrative case, you might mistakenly cancel your campaign and miss out on the next big client!

6. Measure Leads Not Clicks. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see from law firms starting an SEM campaign. A lot of people think that getting a lot of clicks (or “hits”) defines success. This is almost never the case. Here’s an example of why: if I bought the keywords “free money”, “xxx pictures”, and “Britney Spears” on behalf of your Dallas bankruptcy law firm, you’d get millions of clicks – and it would cost you millions of dollars. But do you think your firm would make any money off these keywords? Of course not!

At the end of the day, the best case scenario is to only get clicks from potential clients. That may mean that you get 200 clicks a month instead of 10,000,000, but if all of those clicks come from keywords like “Dallas bankruptcy law firm” and “file bankruptcy in Dallas”, the odds are very high that you will only be paying for clicks that have a high likelihood of turning into actual clients.

Again, remember that your SEM campaign needs to be measured based on ROI and profit, not based on vanity and clicks. Let your competitors buy the high-volume, non-converting keywords and waste their marketing budget while you focus your spend on highly-targeted, converting keywords that bring profitable clients in the door.

7. Be Specific with Keywords. Put yourself in the shoes of a potential client. Try to figure out what word or phrases you might type in a search engine if you were looking for your firm. My advice is to start very conservatively with this exercise. While it is true that you might find clients for your Palm Beach Florida trusts and estates firm via the search “Florida Attorney”, it’s also true that 99% of the people who type in this search are probably looking for something else.

So start with the most specific query you can imagine, like “Palm Beach Florida Trusts and Estates Lawyer”, make sure that you are profitable on this highly-targeted keyword, and then slowly expand to more generic terms (perhaps “Palm Beach lawyer” or “South Florida estates law firm”, etc).

8. Include A Call to Action in Your Ad Text. SEM ads are text-only – there is no opportunity to use color, pictures, or animation. In fact, you only have 95 characters (about 2.5 sentences) to convince searchers to click on your ad versus the ads of your competitors. The most effective way to do this is to give users a “call to action” – in other words, tell them why they should click on your ad and what you want them to do.

The easiest way to think about this is in two parts – first create a benefit statement, second tell the user what to do next. Here’s a few examples of what I mean. Let’s say that you are a Seattle admiralty law attorney. You’ve got 25 years of experience and you give all potential clients free consultation. Here’s an example of an ad that drives these points home and gets people to click through to learn more:

Seattle Admiralty Law Firm
Over 25 Years in Maritime Law.
Call for Free Consultation Now.

Or let’s say that you are a San Diego immigration attorney specializing in H1-B and green card applications. You might create ad text like this:

San Diego H-1B Experts
Fast H1-B and Green Card
Service. Call 567-2343 Today.

Now let’s look at an example that don’t follow this rule. Let’s say you are a Charlotte insurance defense firm and you created this ad:

Smith & Barnes, LLP
Charlotte Insurance Defense Firm.
Licensed in South Carolina.

How are you different? Why should I contact you? What do you want me to do next? If it’s not clear to a user, the odds are that he or she won’t click on your ad and will move on to your competitors’ ads.

9. Restrict Advertising to Your Office Hours. The best thing that can happen after a searcher clicks on your ad is for that person to call your office to schedule a consultation. The worst thing that can happen is for that call to be sent to voice mail or even worse, a number that just rings forever after hours.

Studies show that people who call a business are 3 to 5 times more likely to convert into a client than someone who just visits the business Web site or even submits a “contact us” form. So if you have ads running at 1AM and there is no one around to answer the phone, there’s a decent chance that the potential client on the other end is just going to move on to another firm.

This basically means that you have three options for handling after-hours phone calls: 1) you can have a 24 hour answering service; 2) you can pause your ads after your receptionist leaves; 3) you can grin and bear it and assume that your ROI will be lower after-hours.

For a lot of law firms, I recommend simply pausing your SEM campaigns when you don’t have a live person to answer the phone. This is easy for an SEM expert to set up for you in Google (the tool is called “day-parting”). You can learn about day-parting here.

When you combine day-parting, geo-targeting, and targeted keywords, you give yourself a huge advantage over your competition. What ends up happening is this: you start to bid more and more to show up in top position for great keywords, in the right geography, at the right time, and your competitors’ bids get watered down with all the other keywords you don’t want. That means that you pay a lot for the good stuff, and your competitor ends up paying average prices for everything – you get the good clicks, he gets the bad clicks.

Think of this like a game of poker. If you bet $50 when you have a full house or four of a kind and only $1 when you have a pair, but your competitor bets $25 regardless of what hand he has, who will end up winning? You will, of course!

10. Ask for Help. All of the tips above come from years of trial and error in SEM. When I first started advertising on the search engines back in 2000, I made a lot of mistakes and probably cost my company a lot of money unnecessarily. If you wanted to become an SEM expert, you could take the same route I took – spend a lot of money and a lot of years figuring out what to do. But for most lawyers, I don’t recommend this route, simply because your job is to practice law, not to practice marketing.

That being said, I do think it is valuable to learn ‘enough to be dangerous’ about SEM. Unfortunately, there are a lot of agencies and consultants out there who claim to have your best interests at heart but are really nothing more than fly-by-night scams. They know how to push a law firms’ buttons; I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard law firms tell me “XYZ firm promised me #1 position” or “123 Agency said they would guarantee 10,000 hits a month!”

It’s somewhat similar to getting your car fixed. You know that trick at the oil lube place where they bring out your air filter (which you may have gotten replaced a few weeks earlier) and show you how dirty it is and try to get you to buy a new one? If you don’t know a little about cars, you’d probably get your air filter replaced every 3000 miles. But you also don’t want to spend your weekends changing your oil and replacing your brake pads. So you let the oil lube change the oil, but you know enough to turn down all the ‘extras.’

So learn a little about SEM so that you know how to ask the right questions, then find an expert to do the work for you. You’ll avoid costly mistakes, and you’ll be able to spend your time doing what you do best – representing clients!

It goes without saying that I of course recommend my firm – PPCAdBuying.com – as experts who do have your interests at heart. We’re affordable (starting at under $500 a month, depending on the size of your marketing spend), we have expertise in law firm marketing, and we want you to understand what we’re doing and why it is the right SEM decision for your law firm.

So true to my advice, if you want to learn more, you can either submit a contact us form, or call us at 415-336-8943. All potential clients get a free consultation, so what are you waiting for – call today!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and I’d love the opportunity to help you build a profitable SEM campaign.

 

Word Up: PPC Rap in Da House!

Mad props to my homeboy Tom ‘Da Rower’ F at Mercantila for sending me this (and here’s a link to a Mercantila site in Jive style). OK, enough of the attempts to use slang. The video below is a paid search rap. Truth be told, the rap is pretty bad, and the paid search advice isn’t much better, but the novelty merits a listen. And hey, if we need to use rap to get through to the children of America about paid search . . .

 

Spam Poetry: First Mushing, Now Lassie?

Seems like these spammers really like dog analogies . . .

Put an End to Your Love Failures
Become a God in your lassie’s bedroom
with our new enhancement preparation!
You don’t need to take severe measures!
It’s all safe and natural!

 

A New Google Sneeze: Google Sky

It would be easy to write an entire blog focused on the press’ slobbering over every new Google press release, but I try to limit myself to a few of these stories a year, which I have named “Google Sneezes” (the point being that someone at Google could sneeze and a reporter would want to write about it).

The latest Google sneeze is Google Sky, basically Google Earth but for outer space. Google Sky seems pretty worthless to me – astronomers have far more sophisticated tools and the average joe doesn’t much care to explore thousands of obscure stars and galaxies. That basically makes the addressable market for this product high school science classes and suckers who “named a star” for a loved one.

What’s next for the brains at Google – Google Bird, Google Cubist Art, and Google Periodic Table? Whatever fascinating “20% free time” project is released, no doubt the press will lap it up. My sense, however, is that even the lapdog tech press was pretty bored by this release. Still, they had to write about it – missing a Google product release – no matter how lame – could cost you your tech journalist street cred!

So here’s some of the amusing attempts at trying to make this lame product newsworthy:

Steven Levy in Newsweek, talking about Google and Microsoft’s astronomy releases: “Both efforts offer a means to embark on celestial explorations that skillfully integrate astounding images from telescopes that capture galaxies, star systems and even evidence of black holes from thousands of light-years away, including three of the most celebrated satellite-based probes: Hubble, the Chandra X-ray and the Spitzer Infrared (no hooker jokes, please).”

PC World spent a few pages on Google Sky and concluded: “Errors aside, Google Sky is a terrific way to kill some time and learn about the vast universe.”

The Register writes: “if you’d rather be sucked screaming into a black hole than download an application from the world’s fave search monolith, then this alternative offers hours of fun for all the family. Happy intergalactic surfing.”

TechCrunch noted: “I couldn’t immediately figure out how to zoom in and out. But I’m no rocket scientist. The best part about it is you can search the galaxy by typing astronomy terms into the search box.”

And finally, the Dallas Morning News concluded: “This doesn’t look as cool as the WorldWide Telescope site that Microsoft plans to launch in the very near future, but it should be enough to tide over astronomy buffs.”

Ha . . ha . . . ha . . . choo! You’re excused, Google.

 

Dear Jerry Yang and Steve Ballmer . . .

Dear Jerry and Steve,

I’m writing on behalf of the tens of thousands of people who make their living as search engine marketing professionals. The potential of a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo would no doubt have a major impact on my life and so many others’ and I want to give you a few ideas on how you should move forward once (if?) the acquisition is finalized.

First off, let me just say that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo will no doubt motivate search marketers to spend more time optimizing your properties than they currently do. This is a classic case of the sum of the whole being greater than the individual parts (known in German as “gestalt”). It’s currently not worth spending 5% of my time to optimize Microsoft and 5% on Yahoo, but if I can spend 10% of my time to optimize across both networks at once, that makes sense. So expect me and other SEMers to increase our keywords, ad text, and overall spend once the acquisition is approved.

That’s the good news. But now let me tell the potentially bad news. I’m sure that there are many engineers and product managers at both of your companies who are very proud of the tools and user interfaces that currently exist within Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing. Many of these people will no doubt advocate strongly for their tools to remain active after the acquisition, at the expense of the other company’s tools. In other words, Yahoo engineers will argue for YSM tools, and MSN engineers will argue for AdCenter tools.

Lets be really clear and a little bit crass about both YSM and AdCenter: both suck. I mean this in a relative sense – relative to Google AdWords. AdWords is at least 10 times easier, more powerful, and faster than either YSM or AdCenter. I appreciate the effort both of your companies have undertaken to build your own platforms, but at this point it’s time to just admit that your tools aren’t up to snuff. Any attempt to combine the best of YSM and AdCenter is a mistake. You should either ask Google if you can license their technology, or just outright copy it ASAP.

Here’s a historical analogy that might help you understand what I’m saying. Prior to World War II, the Polish cavalry was renown for their skill and bravery. In September 1939, the German army invaded – with tanks and airplanes. Despite the skill of the Polish cavalry, they were no match for the Germans and were quickly destroyed. You guys are like two commanders of cavalry – even if you choose your absolute best riders (tools) on the best horses (UI), you have no chance against even the most inept tank unit.

So is AdWords the best UI ever? No, of course not. But it’s far and away the best SEM interface out there today – by leaps and bounds. I’m sure it will hurt to admit defeat in this respect, but I guarantee you that the financial rewards will be well worth it. I can’t tell you how many SEMers I talk to who wish they could spend more money on your platforms, but either don’t understand how to use your systems, or have gotten so frustrated that they’ve just given up.

If you are a glass half-full person, this is actually really good news. Think about it: this acquisition is an opportunity to start anew. You can bulldozer through all the corporate politics and do something that will be a financial windfall. This acquisition will look like the greatest thing since, well, AdWords! Combine the added incentive of managing both Yahoo and Microsoft in one interface with a new interface that makes you competitive against AdWords and you’ve created a real powerhouse.

For the record, I’ve sat through a lot of focus groups with your companies over the last eight years. And every time anyone asks me for my opinion about a user interface or tool, I always look straight into the double mirror and say (very slowly): “C-o-p-y A-d-W-o-r-d-s.” I’m sure I’ve annoyed a lot of your usability people with this statement, but the truth often hurts. In any event, best of luck with the acquisition – feel free to drop me a line if I wasn’t clear on anything in this letter!

F4E,

David

 

Awesome Viral Marketing Idea: March Salary Madness

My friend Doug co-founded a nifty (no longer so) little salary data company called PayScale.com. Today he sent me what I think is one of the most awesome (awesomest?) viral ideas I’ve seen in a long time. The PayScale 2008 March Madness Predictions shows you the NCAA mens‘ basketball brackets and predicts the winner of the tournament based on the average salary of graduates from each school.

For example, in the first round #16 UT-Arlington (where my Uncle Jerry is a professor . . .) pulls a shocking upset over #1 seed Memphis, out-earning them $69K to $59K. Indeed, they make it all the way to the Elite Eight before being bounced by Stanford grads, who average $113K!

I won’t tell you who the eventual winner is, you’ll have to check for yourself. And while I tend to doubt that PayScale’s methodology will be too accurate in predicting the actual NCAA champion, I will make one prediction: after seeing the PayScale bracket, you’ll want to immediately send it to all of your friends who are alumni of the participating schools. This will be a massively successful viral campaign. Nice work Payscale!

 

LinkedInsanity Part II: LEO (LinkedIn Optimization)

I promise my fascination with LinkedIn freaks will end shortly – really – but managing a popular LinkedIn group has given me a unique insight into the world of people obsessed with LinkedIn dominance (“dominance” being defined as linking to as many people as possible, regardless of whether you known them or not).

Today I got a request to join the Online Lead Generation group from a woman who had SEO’d her LinkedIn profile as a way of trying to show up in more searches on Linkedin. I’m sure she is not alone in doing this, so let me congratulate her for being one of the innovators of a new field – Linked Optimization, LEO for short (perhaps appropriately, many of these LEO fanatics are proud members of “LION”, which is a designation that is suppose to indicate that you are well-connected but is instead a sure-fire sign that this person will not be accepted to any group I run . . .).

So here’s the “LinkedIn Keywords” that this person uses in her profile. I am grabbing this directly, no editing whatsoever:

#5 TopLinked in San Diego, TopLinked.com, My LinkedIn Power Forum, MyLinkedinPowerForum.com, My Linking Power Forum, MyLinkingPowerForum.com, MLPF, MyLink500, MyLink500.com, LinkedIn Open Networker, Linked In Open Networker, LION, promiscuous networker, promiscuous linker, accept your invitation, accept your invitations, accept your invite, accept your invites, accept all invitations, accept all invites, all invitations accepted, all invites accepted, welcome all invitations, welcome all invites, all invitations welcome, all invitations welcomed, all invites welcome, all invites welcomed, invite me, send me an invitation, connect to me, connect with me, let’s connect, let’s link up, link to me, link with me, email me, contact me, no IDK’s, no IDKs, no I Don’t Knows, no I Don’t Know’s, no “I Don’t Know” responses, 500+ connections, 1000+ connections, 1500+ connections, 2000+ connections, 2500+ connections, 3000+ connections, 3500+ connections, goal = 5000+ connections, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @yahoo.com, @aol.com

Imagine if LinkedIn wasn’t a networking site but rather a dating site. Replace “networker” and “invitation” with “dater” and “dates” and you may soon get a request from Elliot Spitzer (I’ll pile on him like everyone else)! Sad, sad, sad.

 

Online Procrastination Businesses: Trend or Fad?

The couch potato watching TV for five hours a day made TV networks billions of dollars. These days, couch potatoes are still not getting exercise, but they gotten up from the couch and moved to the computer.

When you think about all the “in” online businesses these days, many of them revolve around mindless ways to pass time online. Here’s a few examples:

• Twitter.com: A site where you send people short updates on what you are doing at the moment. For example, if this was a Twitter post I might write: “I’m writing a blog about Twitter.” Apparently, people really like this site.
• Virtual Goods on FaceBook. My friend Jeremy at LightSpeed Venture Partners estimates that FaceBook makes $15 million a year selling “virtual goods.” For example, for $1 I might buy a picture of a flower and email it to you. Not a real flower, mind you, a virtual flower. Amazing.
• LinkedIn Groups. As I just noted in a prior posts, there are apparently hordes of people obsessed with joining as many groups on LinkedIn as they possibly can. Many of these people probably once also collected Garbage Pail Kids.
• Virtual Worlds. Second Life is the most obvious example.
• FaceBook applications. Be a pirate or a cowboy; takes movie quizes; etc, etc.

A lot of these ‘businesses’ have received significant investment, media coverage, and users in the last few years. The question I have is whether they are actually sustainable businesses.

My analysis of potential long-term success is based on the classic marketing distinction between a “trend” and “fad.” A trend represents a sustainable change in behavior. Increasing usage of the Internet is a trend. Couples having their first child after 30 is a trend. Hybrid vehicle usage is a trend. A fad, on the other hand, enjoys a sudden and significant spike in popularity, but then quickly fades into near oblivion. Think “New Kids on the Block”, The Pet Rock, mullets, and The South Beach Diet.

You can make a huge amount of money exploiting both trends and fads, but successful exploitation requires different techniques for each. Exploitation of a trend requires an investment in infrastructure, branding, and long-term planning. Think of the Toyota Prius as an example. In the first few years of its existence, it was sold almost exclusively to fanatical environmentalists, many of whom were willing to wait months or years to get one. Toyota sold only 15,000 Priuses in 2000-2001, the first year of sales in the US. In 2007, they sold 181,000 (up 69% over 2006!). Toyota didn’t make money in these early days, and then didn’t sell many cars. But each year of the Prius‘ existence, demand grew, production costs declined, and the Prius progressed from niche car to well-known brand.

Had Toyota executives spent billions on Super Bowl advertising in the first year of the Prius launch – and expected to sell 500,000 cars every year starting with the first, they would have lost a lot of money and cancelled the project immediately. Toyota, however, understood that hybrid cars had the potential to be a long-term trend and opted to introduce the car slowly and wait for demand to intensify.

A fad, on the other hand, needs the exact opposite approach. When the latest teen band gains stardom on the Disney Channel, the marketing objective is to exploit the band as quickly and as frequently as possible. As far as I can tell, Hannah Montana is the current “it” teen band. As such, the singer is touring constantly, they’ve created a tour movie, and the toy aisle at the drugstore is loaded with all sorts of Hannah related products (kids makeup, karaoke devices, etc). Marketing execs at Disney know full well that Hannah Montana probably has at most one or two more years of popularity before the next generation of kids become infatuated with another teen sensation.

So let’s apply these lessons to marketing online procrastination businesses, like Twitter or a FaceBook application. My sense is that the majority of these businesses are fads with little chance of ever becoming a trend. The novelty of reading a text message diary of your friends will likely fade away, as will the novelty of getting your friends to sign up as ‘pirate supporters’ on FaceBook. Indeed, the novelty of Friendster and MySpace seems to have faded significantly. It’s not out of the question that FaceBook may someday suffer some of the same fatigue.

Whether you are talking about a rock band, movie star, video game, Internet site, or social media application, if the point of the business is to provide entertainment and procrastination, there is a very high chance that your business will be a fad, soon to be replaced by another fad. How many rock bands are true dynasties? How many video games make it past a sequel? How many social media sites have shown more than one year of continual growth?

One important note: there’s no question that there are social media applications that currently have (or will have) an application beyond entertainment. Consider Flickr (photo sharing), LinkedIn (networking), and even FaceBook itself (contact list). All of these sites – though considered to a greater or lesser degree entertainment by many users – also have an element of utility that may enable them to be trends instead of fads.

But when we are talking about virtual Texas Hold ’em on FaceBook – with no value beyond entertainment – the assumption must be that we are witnessing a fad. In such a case, the best thing to do from a business perspective is exploit, exploit, exploit and hope that you sell the business ASAP.

 

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire Lifelines As Search Engine Types

OK, this is a bit of a silly post, but for what it’s worth . . .

My wife and I are hooked on watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire (yes, it is still on TV, just not with Regis Philbin). For those of you who have never watched this show, contestants must answer trivia questions with varying degrees of difficulty. If a contestant isn’t sure about an answer, he can use one of three “lifelines” or types of help. The lifelines are:

• Ask the Audience: the user gets the collective opinion of members of the studio audience;
• Phone a Friend: the user calls a friend up and has 30 seconds to get his advice on the question;
• 50/50: The computer removes two out of four incorrect answers, so that the user gets a 50% chance rather than 25% chance.

What does this have to do with search, well think of it this way:

• Ask the Audience: this is the same concept as collaborative filtering or “discovery” search like StumbleUpon, LaunchCast, or Rotten Tomatoes.
• Phone a Friend: Similar to Mahalo, ChaCha – the results are based on a person’s knowledge – humans instead of computers.
• 50/50: Algorithmic search. An algorithm like Google refines results based on rules to come up with the correct answer. Of course, in Millionaire this is a random result, but the point is that a computer is making the selection rather than one or many humans.

The new version of Millionaire, by the way, also has an additional lifeline once the user gets to the $25,000 milestone – the user can “swap out the question” for a new question. You could argue that this is similar to Google’s rarely used “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature.

For what it’s worth, on Millionaire the effectiveness of the lifelines almost always follows this order:

• Ask the Audience is almost always right.
• Phone a Friend is highly variable and is either 100% or next to no value (my sense though is that the most successful phone a friend experiences occur when the friend on the other line just types the question into Google . . .);
• 50/50 is slightly over 50% (since the user has a bit of an idea in advance);
• Swap the Question rarely has any value.

Interestingly – at least in the current state of search – most people would say that the current success rate of different search models would be:

• Algorithmic Search (Google)
• Collaborative Filtering or Discovery
• Human Guides or Directories
• I’m Feeling Lucky

So, in other words, the game show application is almost exactly opposite to the search world application. Of course a game show isn’t the real world, but this does make me think that algorithms aren’t always the best way to find results. Imagine a search engine that truly could ask 100 random people the answer to a search query instantly – it could be pretty powerful. Maybe Millionaire has it right after all?

 

LinkedInsanity

I love LinkedIn – It’s a useful business application that I use regularly to keep up with old colleagues and connect with new ones. And I like the recent change to a more Facebook-style look and feel, along with the increased focus on networking groups. Indeed, I’ve recently started three networking groups on LinkedIn – one for online lead generation professionals, another for SF SEM experts, and a third for ex-employees of Adteractive.

One of the unfortunate observations I’ve had from starting these groups, however, is that there are a lot of people on LinkedIn who want to connect with and join every group they can. These people treat LinkedIn groups like they are commemorative quarters – the goal is to collect membership in every group.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I rejected someone today for the Online Lead Generation group who was already a member of the following LinkedIn groups:

• StreetTech
• AOL Alumni
• Helping Friends Career Network (LI2HF)
• PajamaNation Club
• LI2 Helping Careers and Friendly Network (Jobs)
• Link to Your World
• Networlding
• Wireless Jobs
• Blog
• Popular Names
• Virtual Networker Society
• ICQ
• Duct Tape Marketing
• Internet Technology Hub
• Virtual Worlds
• Lotus Professionals
• Gmail Users
• 401(k) Plan Participants
• Wikipedia Users Group
• Google Group
• Indeed.com
• MySpace
• Y2K++ Challenge
• Green Group
• Food Lovers
• Speakers and Panelists
• Job Seeker
• Open Source
• CareerBuilder
• Friends of Flanders
• Economist Group
• Data Warehouse – TDWI™
• Generation X
• Volkswagon Club
• WORK From
• Your HOME!:-))
• Sales Growth Friends of / Amis du Canada
• Friends of Slovenia
• Friends of Germany
• Active Blogger
• Bowling is Fun
• Freelancers & Self-Employed Professionals
• Reading, PA
• Finance Professionals Network
• Group Joiners
• Vinyl Fans
• E-Commerce Solutions
• GoBigNetwork Startup Community

Was this lover of Slovenia, bowling, 401(k) programs, and Reading, PA a big fan of lead generation, or was he – as noted in one of his group memberships – a “group joiner”, simply looking to belong to as many groups as possible? After reviewing his profile and seeing absolutely no evidence of any connection to lead gen, I concluded the latter.

I suspect, in fact, that most of the groups this guy joined are totally random. The odds that this one person is an AOL alumnus, Lotus professional, economist, and online lead gen professional seems pretty unlikely to me. Heck, he probably doesn’t even like bowling!

But think about what happens to a LinkedIn group when too many of these “group joiners” end up in the club. Eventually, the group becomes pointless and unfocused. If members have to browse through thousands of irrelevant members to find a legitimate contact, eventually, they’ll just stop using the group entirely.

The other problem with these LinkedIn groups is that it now enables virtually anyone to connect to anyone else, simply by claiming they are in the same group together. These days, I get one or two boilerplate invitations from people I don’t know with messages like “Hi, we are both in the same SEM group on LinkedIn, I would like to add you to my professional network.” While I’m sure that there is a great amount of cache to having such an illustrious blogger as myself in your LinkedIn network, the practical impact of such a connection is meaningless. It’s not as if I’m going to recommend someone for a job just because we linkedin to each other.

There’s even a very silly group called Top Linked which ranks the most-linked people on LinkedIn. At the top (currently) is a guy named Ron Bates who has over 39,000 connections. Clearly, this guy has nothing better to do than to spend his whole day sending requests to be linkedin to random people. Anyone who spends that much of his time connecting with others in actuality probably only has a few real connections.

So while I like the new functionality LinkedIn is providing, I think they may soon face a backlash from users who don’t find much utility in the actual application of the features. In many ways, LinkedIn is now experiencing the same problem previously encountered by Google’s algorithm team. When PageRank first came out, it was amazingly effective, simply because there weren’t any SEO’s around to game the system. As Google grew in importance, so too did the industry of Google SEO’s. This forced Google to constantly update their algorithms to try to counter the efforts of SEOs to obtain top rankings.

Had Google not continually updated their algorithms, the results would have become less and less relevant to users and eventually another search engine would have supplanted Google as the most useful search engine. LinkedIn is at this same crossroads. As “top” users collect connections from people they don’t know, as ridiculous groups emerge, and as ‘group joiners’ infiltrate legitimate groups, it begins to look like the inmates are running the asylum. In such a scenario, it’s only a matter of time before a new LinkedIn competitor – with stricter linking and group rules – starts to draw legitimate LinkedIn users away.

I’m still a big LinkedIn fan, and I’m going to work hard to grow my networking groups into legitimate and useful tools. But I won’t accept an invitation to linkin if I don’t know you, and if you have more than ten groups on your LinkedIn resume, don’t count on getting admission to any of my clubs!

 

Spam Poetry: The Pill for Sled Dog Owners – Mush! Mush!

Great instrumment is your wealth

Try new method of instrumment gain.

The privileges of this method:

* Lengthenn 3+ Inches in length.

* Enlarge Your mae device Width (Girth) By upto 20%.

* Help_Stop_Premature_Ejaculation!

* Your girlfriend will come more often [Ed. note: to visit?]

* Erection_will_be_mush_harder

* Doctor Approved And Recommended

 

There is No "You" in Usability

I recently bought a new computer that came with Microsoft Vista and Microsoft Office 2007. Upon first opening my copy of Excel, I was shocked to find that many of the features I had come to know and love were gone. It seemingly took hours to figure out simple tasks like saving a file or creating a pivot table.

Apparently, I am not alone in being confused by Microsoft’s latest technical advances. In talking to other brave new users of 2007, I heard the same cries for help. So what does this mean – does it mean that the people at MSFT that designed Office (and Vista) are colossal idiots? Does it mean that my friends and I are unable to adapt to new and better things? Or perhaps all of this would be moot if I just became more hip and switched to an iMac?

My sense is that all of these answers are partly correct. The biggest lesson I take from this experience is that usability simply isn’t logical; usability is subjective and is based entirely on the opinions of the people using your product. Thus, even if your users are ‘stupid’ or ‘backward’, you must still create user experiences that delight them, however distasteful this might be for your crack graphic design staff.

Now that I’ve been using Office 2007 for a few months, I’m starting to get used to it, and I’ve even found some features that are definitely a big step up from Office 2000. Indeed, PowerPoint is about 50 times better with 2007 than it ever has been (and I know, my Mac-freak friends, it was copied from some similar Apple program . . .). I suspect that by this time next year, I’ll be dismissing Office 2000 much in the same way that I eventually dismissed DOS in favor of Windows (yes, I am that old).

And I suppose in the world of software, user resistance to change comes with the territory. Microsoft has to continue to innovate, and innovation usually means changing the status quo, and changing the status quo means upsetting all those people who are happy with it and don’t need a “better mousetrap.”

But Microsoft and many other companies have probably learned over the years that the risks of not upsetting the apple cart with innovation are just as great. Imagine, for example, if Google had never changed anything to their AdWords program. You’d see plenty of made for AdSense spam, duplicate ads from the same companies, trademark infringing ads, and probably ongoing declines in click-through-rate. And, like Microsoft, Google continually upsets their base every time they make a change to AdWords, but most of these changes seem to paid off in the long run.

When it comes to Web sites, however, I do think the lesson that ‘innovation is necessary, even if it upsets some users’ does not apply so cleanly. As marketers, our job is to drive conversions for our companies. Anything you add to your site that doesn’t drive conversions (either in the immediate term or from a lifetime value perspective) is unnecessary and shouldn’t be there.

For example, let’s say your graphic designer really wants to employ a full AJAX functionality on your landing pages. He argues that this is the slickest way to display results these days and that ‘everyone is doing it.’ Your clientele, however, happens to be middle-aged people who just got dial up access from AOL last month. Any technology that is more complicated than a Craigslist page is likely to confuse them and make them abandon your site. In this case, innovation could kill your company. Sure, you might get laughed at when you go a trade show and your competitors see your “1998” Web site, but you’ll laugh a lot more when your conversion rates stay strong as your creative competition drops into obscurity.

Of course, none of this should prevent you from testing, testing, and testing different ideas. But let your customers tell you which ideas work, rather than choosing the idea that is the latest craze.

Apple will probably never convert me from my PC. Why? Because the usability of a PC and Windows is just what I have grown up on, and even if the Apple usability is “in theory” better than a PC, from my perspective, it’s as foreign as Swahili. Logical? Of course not. A valid user perspective – absolutely.

 

Mad Props to the Skull Trail: blogation.net Now Works!

For months, many of you have gently pointed out that entering http://www.blogation.net/ into a browser bar sent you to my blog, but entering blogation.net (without the www) sent you to a GoDaddy page.

Thanks to a great post by Skull Trail, the problem has been solved! It was way more complicated that it should have been (I had to ping my own blog to get the IP address? I never would have thought of that in a million years), but it’s all good now.

Next stop, switching to WordPress so I can actually add meta-titles to blog titles . . .

 

Responding to Your Comments: Google Stock, Ad Text, Terry Semel

As always, I love receiving comments on my posts – I read every single one and now just need to do a better job of responding on a regular basis. Here are some recent comments that I enjoyed and my responses:

On Google Stock Dropping on comScore Data:

Alan from the Rimm–Kaufmann Group wrote: “For what it is worth, our agency’s PPC same-client spend on Google is still increasing, and increasing faster on G than on Y, M, or A” and SearchQuant chimed in “if I were you I’d stash gold, silver, palladium and /or platinum rather than cash. The U. govt’s printing money like it’s going out of style.”

It definitely doesn’t surprise me that Google spending continues to outspend Yahoo, MSN, or Ask spending. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve begged reps from non-Google search engines: “Please, give us more quality traffic – we would love to diversify our spend across multiple search engines, rather than spending everything with Google.” The fact remains that the only place for quality and quantity is Google at the moment. And I agree, Alan, it seems to get more lopsided every day.

SearchQuant, as I’ve noted multiple times, my investment skills are famously poor (hence my investment in WebVan). So if I invest in precious metals, expect that market to tank immediately!

On Awesome AdWords Ad Copy:

Jeremy wrote: “While I agree with you that the ad copy is clever and may get an above average CTR, do you think clicks using techniques such as these turn into conversions?” and an anonymous commenter said: “can you clarify whether this ad text was in an email in your inbox, or an ad served through the AdSense network that appeared alongside the email you were reading? If it showed up via AdSense, then it had nothing to do with bypassing Gmail Spam filters.”

First off, good point Jeremy, but I tend to think that this ad copy does drive conversions. My guess is that this is a pure “escalation of commitment” play – the user clicks on the ad, then registers with Reunion before they can see any ‘messages’, and the registration probably includes a credit card for a 7 day free trial. By the time the user realizes that there aren’t actually any messages for them, they’ve already given over their credit card info and started using the system. The odds of this sort of user either a) forgetting that they gave their credit card info for a few months or b) actually going forward and deciding to be a member are a lot greater than a user who comes to the site without the promise of ‘messages.’

With respect to bypassing Gmail’s Spam filter, my point is that this message – if sent via email – would never make it anywhere near my inbox, but since it is showing up on AdSense it is effectively making it into (or near) my inbox without the Gmail Spam filter being involved at all.

On Terry Semel and 1000 laid off Yahoos:

SearchQuant wrote: “AMEN, David. Terry Semel was, during his time at Yahoo, the epitome of the well-connected, self-interested, monumentally incapable CEO: and Darren agreed “I always thought Semel got too much credit for turning yahoo around – he benefited from the turnaround in online advertising, that’s all.”

My question is this: how can I get myself into a position to under perform and get paid $450 million for doing it? What am I doing wrong? Do I need more recommendations on LinkedIn?

Finally, on Tips for Promoting Your Blog:

Jay from MemberSpeed wrote: “I think that our varying sense of individualities can also be tied up to certain commonalities. From there, you should try to cater to a certain group who think and appreciate the same things that you do.”

I agree Jay. There are so many blogs today I think most of us simply don’t have the time to read everything out there, so we tend to gravitate towards bloggers that ‘speak our language.’ I’ve always thought that I could grow my blog readership by posting less thoughtful but more frequent posts (i.e., just reporting the ‘news’), but that’s not me, and I think I’d be catering to a different audience than the one I have today (and I prefer to cater to you folks, trust me!)

Thanks to everyone for your comments – keep ’em coming!

 

Questionable Data Sinks Google Stock

Last week, Google shares fell $22 (4.6%) on news that comScore data showed a 7.5% drop in monthly Google paid clicks. As one Wall Street analyst put it, “Though we hesitate to read too much into ComScore data in general and one month’s release in particular, we are incrementally more cautious on our revenue growth estimates for Google sites.’’

My reaction to this data (and to the Google stock decline) was mixed. On the one hand, Google’s stock price has seemed really high to me for several months. Indeed, last month I calculated that Google’s market cap was equivalent to the combined value of Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, IAC (Ask, CitySearch, etc), Time Warner (with AOL), SalesForce, Priceline, and Expedia. From that perspective, a decline in Google value seems appropriate.

But on the other hand, I am not a big fan of comScore (or competitor Nielsen NetRatings) data. Indeed, read that analyst’s statement again: “though we hesitate to read too much into ComScore data in general . . .” – that’s pretty weak justification for downgrading a stock.

My personal experience has shown just how ridiculous comScore and Nielsen data is when it comes to online metrics. A few months back, Nielsen produced data that suggested that NexTag was spending around $860 million a year on online advertising. I might have believed this number without question, were it not for the fact that the same report showed my former employer – Adteractive – spending $420 million annually. As I wrote on my personal SEM blog: “I can say with a very high degree of confidence that Adteractive did not spend $420 million, $200 million, $100 million, or probably even $40 million dollars.” That’s right, the Nielsen data was off by a factor of 10X or greater. And I’ve had similar experiences with comScore to make me question their methodology as well. I won’t go into it here, but my original blog posting on this topic has all the lurid details.

So the fact that alleged stock experts and the overall market in general is using this data to cut billions of dollars of market valuation off Google (or any other Internet stock, for that matter) is concerning. It basically shows that the general public really doesn’t understand Internet advertising well enough to accurately determine an Internet company’s worth. This is a scary scenario for any Internet company currently enjoying the wave of investing exuberance. In particular, I’m talking about Google here. When your stock balloons to $750 a share and a $170 billion market cap, you’ve either got incredible underlying fundamentals, incredible hype, or both.

In Google’s case, I think the answer is “both.” Google is a cash machine and they’ve constantly impressed the market with their quarter after quarter record earnings. But Google is also the darling of analysts and the public, just like so many hyped-up companies in the past (Enron, WebVan, Krispy Kreme, etc). I’m not suggesting that Google is “all hat and no cows” like Enron or WebVan, but I do find it interesting that Google stock can fluctuate so significantly on data that a serious Internet investor would dismiss as meaningless.

Once again, I go back to the analyst who starts his comment by saying ‘the data is worthless’ and ends by saying ‘but we are downgrading nonetheless.’ Maybe that is code for ‘this stock has a lot of hype and any bad news – even fake bad news – could cause the hype to implode so we are downgrading.’

I’ve never owned Google shares, and my track record of stock picking isn’t stellar (yes, I did buy WebVan at $6 a share . . .). But I do spend most of my working hours thinking about online advertising, and it’s troubling to see Internet stock prices influenced by pointless statistics. After all, at the end of the day, the billions invested in stocks and venture capital in Internet technology is what keeps the heat on in my house. The fact that the public could one day be scared off from investing in the Internet – and possibly due to unfounded data – makes me want to stash a few more dollars under the bed for a rainy day.

 

Awesome AdWords Ad Text: Part I of An Ongoing Series

As loyal readers of this blog know, I constantly lecture people not to over-emphasize keyword research at the expense of all the other important aspects of SEM, such as ad copy, filtering, landing pages, and tracking. So I’m happy to introduce a new feature of Blogation that emphasizes the fine art of ad copy creation: The Blogation “Awesome AdWords Ad Text Award” series.

Today’s nominee comes from Reunion.com for an ad served on the Google AdSense network whilst I was reading an email from my cousin about Facebook. Here’s the text:

Unread Message (2)
Reunion.com –
Read Message (Yes) (N0)

I’m sure many of you have received annoying email spam with titles like this, intended to make you think that someone is actually trying to get in touch with you. And I’m sure that most of you at this point have caught on to this little trick. But when I got this message showing up at the top of my Gmail account, I had to do a double-take. After all, Gmail has great spam filtering so I’ve come to expect that any emails that actually make it to my inbox are legit.

And keep in mind that most people aren’t Internet savvy enough to understand that AdSense is paid messaging. The result is that Reunion.com has effectively bypassed the Gmail spam folder with ad text that will likely trick less savvy emailers and could even fool us Internet old timers.

So kudos to the Reunion.com SEM team for great ad text. Stay tuned for more honorees in the future.