MattAster.com

Let me save you 5 minutes if all you want is the TL;dr version. There is no simple equation, you test and try until you find the balance.

Ok, we’ve got that out of the way. I recently found myself on the other end of the table with 2 Directors asking me what I would change about a website for marketing purposes… never being someone to avoid being brutally honest I was just that. “Your website isn’t built for SEM, it doesn’t have enough content and it’s too image heavy”. Their response was simple, and very common, “But it got great usability results!”

Having a great usable website is definitely something to be proud of, but your customers still have to find it… if you’re reading my blog, odds are you understand a bit about search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword density, but if you aren’t I’ll sum it up. If you want to rank high on the search engines you need content for the keywords you choose to optimize on (a lot goes into it, but this is the million foot view). Their website ranked great for usability because it was short, simple, eye catching, and to the point… the problem with that… it didn’t have any content for which to rank.

My suggestions were pretty simple but required significant changes to their philosophy… generally here’s some good advice for just about every company. Build up more content, keep your homepage fresh, maintain your hot spots (if you always have your phone number in one place don’t change that), and remember the core SEO functions. If you find your users love your website but you aren’t ranking very high, consider reevaluating your web strategy just a bit.

I had some other interesting thoughts regarding their paid search strategy but I’ll save that for another day.

Blaming Google for facilitating human trafficking is a lot like blaming keyboards for typos and blaming guns on murder. Correlation is not causation.

Long times it seems the policy of AdWords has been to play a blind eye, with pharma you saw it… and Google is paying for it… but is it REALLY that far fetched that Google applies the, “Well it’s illegal… so why is it our job to police this” litmus test? Does anyone believe that determined criminals are really “going out of business” because they can’t run their Online Pharmacy ads on Google?

The same applies to human trafficking, in a lot of ways Google not doing anything could help law enforcement. Google has a longstanding habit of cooperating very easily with law enforcement (see the transparency report: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/US/?p=2011-06&t=USER_DATA_REQUEST) but the true question comes down to this… just because you’re the biggest player in the game, doesn’t mean you should be held responsible for everything that goes wrong.

Just an opinion, take it for what you paid for it.

Just busy

Read the full article here http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2011/12/27/news/nh4885428.txt?viewmode=fullstory

I had no idea what goes into doing an interview on behalf of a corporation… I had to get permission, review talking points with Communications and Government Relations, and then do the interview supervised. Definitely an interesting experience and I’m pleased with the article.

… in other news, duh.
Also, I don’t have much to add, the marketing season is upon us so I’ve got my hands filled until calendar new year… *sigh*

One of the things I always find myself saying when I show a report to a stakeholder is inevitably, “ignore that, it’s inaccurate more than it’s not”. Bounce rate and Index are ALWAYS the 2 I know I’m going to get a question on.

A week ago Google announced in Analytics they are going to allow for “non interaction events”, it seems the new flag will allow you to pass events without screwing your bounce rate.

For those not familiar, bounce rate is a 1×1 visit, at the simplest explanation it’s someone that visited your website and then left without “engaging” in anything… it’s a great metric for figuring out landing page effectiveness but because events would trigger an engagement you ended up sacrificing either data or testing… and I’m not comfortable with either of those options.

I tested our first campaign on Reddit today at work. They are having trouble filling an engineering position and I’ve been dying to try a sponsored link on reddit.com, seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Couple pieces of feedback and notes.

1. Reddit is exclusively run of site style impression based advertising (no CPM). You bid based off how much you’re willing to spend for a daily budget.
   • This presented a difficult challenge for me as a corporate advertiser, since I could not be guaranteed a certain number of impressions or clicks for my budget I’m lucky I got it through
2. There is a 2 day maximum lead time on your creative approval
   • Another enterprise challenge, ad approval on the major networks is usually within hours, and on the networks I’m whitelisted it’s almost instant.
3. You can only pick 1 targeted subreddit (think of a subreddit like it’s own website) or the entire website per campaign
   • This presented a major benefit, I didn’t want to advertise our position across the entire site, but I also would have liked to pick more than 1 subreddit based on my budget

All in all, I’m still pleased with the results and it appears I’ll be under $1 CPC so pending our conversion insight I’ll consider them again. I’d encourage folks to keep an eye on reddit advertising, but know there are some serious limitations in what it provides right now, I expect them to advance significantly but the question remains.

Is their current solution scalable? If I was competing against more advertisers this foggy method of bid control is not likely to provide enough control to their business partners.

… giving a presentation on what I do tomorrow at work and I’m telling people to search for me if they want to learn more about me…

so… *wave* hi work people.

Leaving for vacation Thursday… pictures and such to follow