What If You Didn't...

By Scott Grall

I have heard lots of companies and organizations say social media really isn't all that important in this economic climate. That attitude can be a huge miscalculation.

Why? There are countless examples of companies taking that exact position on social media, only to pay a big price either in market share, public perception or even worse - the ability to stay in business.

The common argument companies use is it is difficult to prove return on investment when sing social media. While that may be true, thinking social media will bring in money immediately is the wrong approach.

Think of it this way...back before social media, when you had a bad experience or poor service with a company, you likely told friends, co-workers and family and word slowly spread over time. Now, if anyone with a mobile device has a bad experience at perhaps your company (right or wrong), they can immediately reach thousands of people instantly by posting a Facebook message or posting on Twitter.

So it is essential companies understand social media is necessary - at the very least - because they need to know what their customers are saying. Companies who keep a finger on that pulse and respond appropriately will win in this marketplace.

If it seems too overwhelming to your company, there are firms and individuals - like me - who can help properly set up your social media platforms and then monitor them.

Structuring a PPC account

Articles about Paid Search usually focus on bid management, copy development, landing page optimization or keyword selection. I’d like to discuss a often overlooked, but equally important, component of every paid search program...the structure.

I will write about Google and the options they give to structure your program. Google has three levels to their structure - the account, campaign, ad group and keyword. An account is allowed 25 campaigns, 2000 ad groups per campaign and 2000 keywords per ad group or about 50000 keywords per account.

The account is the highest level of the structure. It contains contact information, billing information access to administrative settings.

At the campaign level you can manage daily budgets, geo-targeting, end dates and language preference. The best way to organize your account is to create a campaign for each category of product or service you offer. If you sell apparel you may have three campaigns - womens, mens, and childrens. But, more likely you will want to take advantage of the 25 campaigns and get a more granular - womens tops, womens bottoms, womens shoes, mens tops, mens bottoms, mens shoes, childrens tops, childrens bottoms and childrens shoes. Let your internal categorizations and budget drive your decisions for campaigns.

Ad groups are a set of keywords grouped by theme. The key to good ad groups is that they be very specific. Ads (copy) and landing page are assigned at the ad group level. If you are selling similar products with different unique selling points, such as products of different quality and price, you will definitely want to have a different marketing message in the copy and probably deliver the shopper to different landing pages. This will allow more options for testing, better visibility into performance and help find opportunities for expansion for your business. HINT: Logically naming ad groups will help you and others quickly read, understand and prepare reports of results.

By properly structuring your account you can better manage your budget, have more precision with your marketing message,increase relevance which will improve the quality score, thereby lowering costs.

How Social Should You Be?

By Scott Grall

So maybe you started a blog, but you've found no one has read your blog. Well, there's a reason for that. You need to promote your blog and then link to other blogs.

To promote, you might think you need to spend money. That's not necessarily the case. Social media offers you free platforms to promote yourself and talk about topics. Be careful, however. Being overly promotional in any form of social media is taboo.

So start simply. Open a Facebook account, find friends, co-workers, etc and form your network. How to do this all will be covered in another post. But once you've mastered your blog posts, you can tell friends, family, co-workers - anyone who will listen - that you have a new blog post.

So keep blogging and we will get you on the social media highway!