With the digital climate gaining more ground each day, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is more important than ever when it comes to getting the most out of your business.

Online sales are taking over the marketplace as consumers are changing their shopping habits from the tradition of brick and mortar establishments to the ease and convenience that the web offers. Ken Burke from Targetmarketingmag.com gives us a look at how businesses can best use the search engines we all know and love to get consumers interested, impressed, and involved.

1. Get Indexed With the Top Three Search Engines
Make certain that all the pages on your site are fully indexed with Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Google typically handles 46 percent of all searches conducted online monthly, and on average will be your primary source of search engine traffic and orders.

You can be proactive about getting listed with Google by submitting your pages using Google Sitemaps. Also, submitting your site to the open directory dmoz.org will speed up the overall indexing process and will help Yahoo! and MSN find your site faster, as well.

2. Get Your Keywords Right for Paid Search
Develop a robust list of keywords. Re-examine this list at least quarterly to ensure you optimize the most popular terms shoppers are using. Online shoppers now use four- and five-word keyword strings to more quickly find what they’re looking for. A shopper who used to search for “red sweater” now is more likely to search on “men’s red wool pullover sweater” to focus the search and yield better results.

Create keyword combinations using your existing category and subcategory navigation, and purchase them as keywords. For example, if you run a large and diverse department store Web site, you would need to purchase broad category names such as apparel, housewares, lawn and garden, cosmetics, clearance … and whatever other primary category names make up your product line.

You also need to own each sub-category name. An apparel retailer might need words like sweaters, dresses, menswear, women’s, petites, etc.

Purchase key phrases composed of the words listed above in combination with terms that describe your products such as wool, cotton, cardigan, pullover, etc.

And don’t forget about synonyms, because everybody uses slightly different terms to find the same things. You also should consider buying your brand name and branded keywords. The price per click is likely to be low, and it will ensure that you always have top position.

3. Manage Your Copy for Natural Search
You can improve your rankings in natural search by tailoring your content for better performance. While every search engine is different, you can focus your content optimization efforts around a standard set of key variables: page title, product name, metadata, image alt descriptions and visible HTML text on the page.

Incorporate your targeted keywords and key phrases in each of these variables. However, make sure you find the right balance. Repeating your keywords too often on a given page may depress keyword ranking. Use a consistent product naming convention based on terms your customers use. Call a shoe a shoe, and not “footgear.”

Proactively managing your copy for paid search is just as important. In the sponsored search listings you submit to Google, Yahoo! and MSN, ensure you repeat the keyword in your ad title and in the body of the listing. Add a differentiator such as “10,000 items online” or “lowest prices” to the body of the listing to make your copy stand out.

4. Send Them to the Right Landing Page
When your potential buyer clicks on your search engine listing, he should land on the most relevant page as deep within your site as possible, and as close to an actual point of purchase as possible. Shoppers won’t bother to search through your site to find the specific product they want. If they want a men’s red, wool, pullover sweater and you don’t hand it to them right away, they’ll go straight back to the search engine and find a competitor who will.

Send shoppers to a page that matches the level of granularity of the search terms they use. If they use broad search terms, such as “apparel,” send them to your homepage if you are a pure-play appareler or to your apparel category page. If they search for a specific product such as a red sweater, show them a specific product or present them with a result set for red sweater from your internal site search. Give them the chance to click “buy” right away.

5. Use Natural Search and Paid Search in Tandem
Natural and paid search have a symbiotic relationship. Natural search yields results more slowly and is a long-term strategy. Results are dependent on the quality and quantity of the information you incorporate into your Web site through metatags, keywords and visible page content. Natural search optimization is more difficult to do correctly, but it’s much more flexible because it’s not keyword or search engine dependent.

Paid search yields faster results with easily trackable ROI, and is limited by budget and the number of listings you can create. Whatever you do for a paid listing is specific to only one engine.

Test the effectiveness of your keywords in paid search. See what produces strong conversions and sales and incorporate these terms into your Web site to drive natural search results.

6. Benchmark Yourself
Are your search engine results delivering acceptable conversion rates, or are your pages and products not showing up at all? Are you consistently beating the competition, or are you always in second place? Know your rankings, particularly for your most important products or categories. Find out what pages currently generate the most sales and work to get your potential customers to land there.

Study your competitors. Model your approach to first meet and then beat them. Find out what keywords and phrases they use, and decide whether you should use them as well.

7. Know Your Customers and How They Search
Study your site’s internal search feature to find out what keywords and phrases customers are using. Insert these terms into your list of keywords and into the written content on your site.

Watch what happens when your customers come to you from a search engine. Do they actually buy anything? If you get a lot of browsers from Google but they don’t buy, your search standings probably are OK, but your site is letting them down. Find out what pages generate the best conversion and which products sell best; then augment your keyword list to make those pages easier to find.

8. Play to Your Strengths
If you specialize in high-end home accessories, play it up with appropriate keywords and written copy. Choose keywords that emphasize the overall value of your offering, your selection, your knowledge of your product line and your expertise in the sector.

You also can differentiate yourself from your competitors by presenting your brand value, exceptional customer service, an easy return policy and product guarantees in your ad copy or within the search landing pages.

9. Use Comparison Shopping Sites
Consumers are using comparison shopping sites more often because they make it easy to find the best price on the products they want. Their primary advantage to the merchant is that they bring you qualified, motivated buyers. They’re also a good way to introduce your business to shoppers who might otherwise never discover you.

Their primary disadvantage is that they can create downward pressure on prices. If you can’t compete on price, you can still compete using other differentiators as mentioned above.

10. Tracking, Testing and Tuning
Tracking and measurement enable you to execute effectively on anything in this list.

Modern analytics tools let you track and measure an incredible volume of data, but this can be overwhelming. Focus on the following data first:

– conversion as determined by specific keyword, category and landing page;

– traffic, sales and conversion rates from each search engine; and

– search engine rankings.

Test your keywords, landing pages and written copy to see what works best. If your analytics application allows it, set up A/B tests for your most important products and categories. Consolidate your lead in your strongest areas, then work on improving the response in other important areas.

Fine-tune your site, your keyword list and your paid listings. Sometimes you will discover an enormous improvement by making small changes, but even incremental improvements in conversion, average number of items per order and click-through rate can lead to significant improvements in your bottom line. Use all the tools at your disposal to identify where you need a boost, and work for continual improvement.

via Entrepreneur.com

People know a great ad when they see one, but getting that ad to right people at the right time is an art unto itself. As innovation in advertising technology renders old tactics obsolete, it also opens new opportunities to reach your audience.

The central questions in digital advertising today are: Where will people listen? What content will they engage with? How do I reach them? The answers are key to understanding four trends that are shaping the industry.

1. Mobile video advertising.

Mobile video consumption is growing rapidly and providing advertisers with a way to reach consumers when they are paying attention. Between Q3 2012 and Q3 2014, smartphone and tablet video consumption grew 400 percent and now accounts for 30 percent of all online videos played, according to Ooyala’s Global Video Index. This trend has been helped along by the expansion of fast 4G/LTE coverage. The bigger iPhone 6 screen and the popularity of other ‘phablets’ (large-screen smartphones) also reflect the growing importance of mobile video. As phablets saturate the market, they will in turn feed the growth of mobile video.

Mobile video viewers are what you might call a “captive” audience. When TV commercials begin, people look down at their phones. On the bus or subway, people focus on their digital screens instead of the ads passing by in the cityscape. When radio ads begin, people change the station. However, when people are already looking at their smartphone, nothing is going to distract them. Use mobile video ads to take advantage of this undivided attention.

2. Native advertising.

When websites feature advertisements that emulate the content and style of their own site, we consider it native advertising. Native ad spending will climb from $3.2 billion in 2014 to $8.8 billion by 2018, largely because advertisers are seeing above average engagement with this format, according to an eMarketer forecast.

Native ads are typically long-form blog posts, infographics or videos that aim to inform, entertain and inspire people without directly promoting a product. For example, a banner ad from a clothing retailer might promote a winter clothing sale, but a native ad from the same retailer might discuss winter fashion tips instead. Typically, native ads are tagged with a disclaimer such as “sponsored content”, “paid post” or “promoted by”.

If you’re targeting millennials, who tend to be put off by “salesy” ad content, consider native advertising. Now that publishers are partnering with advertisers in the production process (i.e. helping them write and edit), it’s easy to get expert help.

3. Viewable impressions.

Until recently, digital advertisers were very susceptible to fraud. Many were misled into paying for bottom-of-the-page ads that no one scrolled down far enough to see. “Click fraud” was also a huge risk. Essentially, some people realized they could run up their competitors’ advertising bills by creating computer programs (“bots”) that automatically click ads. This practice became so rampant that fraudulent bot traffic may have cost the advertising industry as much as $11.6 billion in 2014. Thankfully, new viewability technology and an advertising model called “viewable impressions” are eradicating both of these problems.

With viewable impressions, advertisers are only charged if the ad appears on a user’s screen for a minimum duration. According to the industry standard, for a display ad to count as a viewable impression, 50 percent of the pixels have to appear on the screen for a minimum of one second. For video, 50 percent of pixels have to appear for a minimum of two seconds. Bots can’t create fraudulent viewable impressions because they can’t complete the actions that distinguish a genuine user view from a false one.

However, in many cases, one or two seconds isn’t nearly enough time to engage a viewer. When you purchase viewable impressions, make sure you have the option to buy guaranteed time slots (e.g. five, 10 or 20 seconds), especially if you plan to run video ads. If you purchased a 10 second slot, you’d only be charged if your ad was continuously viewable for ten seconds or longer. The rate you pay reflects the total amount of time your audience spends with the advertisement.

4. Behavioral data.

New channels, tactics and payments models will only serve your marketing efforts if ads reach the right people. Rather than spending your budget on a large set of consumers, you can more efficiently use behavioral data to target people who fit your customer persona.

While advertisers commonly target individual websites where they expect their customer to hang out, behavioral data improves upon this approach by allowing you to target groups of people across multiple advertising properties. Behavioral targeting providers can profile a group (e.g. mothers with young kids) based on an analysis of online searches, Internet browsing habits, purchasing history and much more. If you’re targeting specific types of consumers, behavioral data can mean the difference between a bungled campaign and a huge victory.

Mobile video ads, native advertising, viewable impressions and behavioral targeting are the defining trends in digital advertising. The strategies that worked for advertisers for the past five years won’t work indefinitely. As these trends illustrate, the channels are continually changing, and the audience on the other end has new habits and preferences. Get the most out of your advertising spend by testing these new four strategies and discovering what works for you.

Ad Serving and Tracking Technology Solves Two Big Problems for Marketers

via AdAge

When Facebook acquired Atlas from Microsoft for nearly $100 million in 2013, it was a head-scratcher for many industry observers. After all, what strategic value would a legacy ad server have for the world’s largest social network? Last week we learned the answer to that question when Facebook unveiled its Atlas relaunch.

Originally acquired by Microsoft as part of its $6.3 billion deal for aQuantive in 2007, Atlas served principally as an alternative to Google‘s DART tracking system. Atlas was foremost about measurement, and it was used by advertisers and agencies for tracking display ad efficacy.

So what does Facebook intend to use it for now, and what does its relaunch mean? First, it’s important to understand that Atlas’ tracking and measurement DNA is what initially made it so appealing to Mr. Zuckerberg. Starting with Atlas’ DNA and then rewriting it from the ground up allows Facebook to use Atlas as part of its push to measure cross-device and cross-platform and to leverage display targeting capabilities powered by Facebook ID.

This is a big move for Facebook, and it has more significant implications for brands and agencies than anyone could have predicted 18 months ago. Atlas opens up two new and extremely powerful capabilities for brands and agencies: It lets them measure ad campaigns across screens by solving the cookie problem; and it lets them target real people across mobile and the web.

Here’s how brands and agencies can use Facebook and Atlas to conquer a changing digital advertising ecosystem:

Solving the cookie problem

First and foremost, Facebook, like most marketers, understands that cookies aren’t working. On average, cookies have a 59% tracking success rate, and they overstate frequency by 41%, according to executives on an Atlas launch panel at Advertising Week last week. What’s worse, as the internet shifts to mobile, cookies fail to connect users across devices and do nothing to solve the challenge of mobile conversion tracking.

According to Erik Johnson, managing director of Atlas, 41% of all purchases start on one device and move to another (typically moving smaller to larger — phone to tablet or laptop). Today, advertisers typically lose the thread on this device sequence chain when measuring media ROI. The new Atlas will go a long way towards fixing this with new cross-device reporting capabilities.

How does Atlas fix the cookie problem? It uses Facebook’s persistent ID rather than a cookie, allowing Atlas to measure user activity on mobile and desktop, including mobile conversion and desktop conversion tracking. Atlas also enables media mix modeling, helping advertisers understand how to allocate their budgets across devices. This may have the most impact we’ve seen in years for solving cross-device reporting and cross-channel issues, dramatically opening up the mobile market.

Targeting real people vs. phantom people on the web and mobile

While the tracking is fantastic, Facebook’s ability to target real people across devices is even more powerful. This opens up a tremendous opportunity for brands and their agencies. Facebook’s Audience Network already enables advertisers to find appropriate audiences on a whole new set of inventory by using signals such as demographic, psychographic and behavioral data. Now, Atlas gives advertisers access to Facebook’s targeting precision across the entire web, wherever consumers access it.

Consider this use case: Marketers could leverage Facebook targeting to reach a consumer on ESPN.com, and then use Facebook’s Audience Network to reach that same consumer on ESPN’s SportsCenter app. This is incredibly powerful, and it’s a real shot across the bow at Google and every other vendor still trying to break mobile and desktop targeting out of separate silos.

Facebook is pushing beyond the restrictive label of “social” and rewriting the rules of the game in digital marketing along the way. The new Atlas capabilities are a substantial step in this direction. If nothing else, it highlights that social is not just a channel. Rather, social is a fundamentally different way to understand and execute digital marketing. It is far more about data than platform, and Facebook is making this vision a reality. Success in digital marketing should be about finding precise consumer audiences and identities, not abstractions like campaigns and line items. Atlas is making Facebook more people-focused than ever before, and brands and agencies would be smart to follow suit.