PPC Blog by Gordon Choi

LinkedIn.com is a social networking site for professionals. You can easily self-brand yourself on the LinkedIn platform.

Profile

Create your personal profile, which can be used very much like an online resume (or CV). Besides your current job, the jobs you have participated in the past and your educations / qualifications, you can also fill in a summary, and honors and awards. There is this website section available, so that you can enter your company’s web address and your personal blog’s URL, should you have one.

There is an advantage to SEO your LinkedIn profile. You can use your LinkedIn profile to complement your personal blog in the SERP. A keyword search on my name “Gordon Choi” returns my PPC blog at positions 1 and 2, but also returns my LinkedIn profile at positions 5 and 6.

You can even place PPC ads on Google pointing to your personal Linkedin Profile page:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonchoi

Remember to also upload your photo to improve credibility.

Network Expansion

The purpose of being on LinkedIn is that you want to be within a network of people. Once you have your profile created, you should send invitation to connect to people you know. How LinkedIn works is that once you have connected to your colleagues, friends, and business partners, you will be able to further expand your network by connecting to their colleagues, friends, and business partners. So at a later stage, the more “contacts” you have on LinkedIn, the easier for you to get connected to more people.

Recommendation

Get recommended by people you have worked with – managers, colleagues, and clients can be the most appropriate references to write recommendations about the work you have involved in the past. This can help your possible future employers and other people when considering you being one of the candidates.

“Gordon is an exceptional paid search professional. His knowledge, experience and insights, together with high work ethic, were applied to a successful leadership of a 16 person strong paid search team. He is a rare talent in the PPC field.”

October 19, 2007 - Michael Leeman, Director, Clicks2Customers, Inc.

Answers and Q/A

Participate in linkedIn Answers and Q/A on topics of your expertise. This can certainly be a good way to show your expertise to your future references.

Company Page

As an individual LinkedIn user, you can’t do much about the content on the company page. However, the company page does display employees who are more active in engaging with other users. You should also enable notifications on your profile and status changes, if you want to possibly have your name shown more often on the company page.

Other Benefits

Besides branding yourself and expanding your networks, you can also find out industry and/or company news your colleagues / friends / business partners have been reading and discuss the topics with them.

As entrepreneurs, you can join LinkedIn user-created groups and discover new business partnerships and opportunities of your industries.

Other than all the above, on your profile page there is this one field right under your name (which appears at the top) called “Your Professional Headline”. From time to time, I have seen some extremely interesting and creative professional headlines written by other LinkedIn users:

* Man of leisure
* Senior Manager looking for a challenge
* Call me a media person

I would love to know if they receive more daily views because of their creative headlines! I went for a conventional, boring and appropriate professional headline that simply says “Head of PPC at Alibaba.com”.

Statistics

According to this report of Compete.com, LinkedIn.com ranked in the top 10 of all social networks in February 2008, with competitions from the highly popular social network sites such as Facebook and Myspace.

Other Social Network Sites

Previously, I have also listed other social media marketing opportunities.

Posted in: Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Network Sites, Web 2.0 | No Comments

Effectively optimizing Google Adwords content targeting campaigns does require the separation of search and content campaigns, the implementation of conversion tracking, and the use of placement performance report. If you have been paying for excessive traffic with low conversion rate and are hoping to improve your campaign ROI, the following site exclusion methods should also be considered:

Site and Category Exclusion

The Site and Category Exclusion Tool can prevent individual sites or categories of web pages in the Google Network from showing your ads. The exclusion tool works only on the campaign level and you will have to go through each campaign when setting up this tool. There are 3 major options: Site, Topics and Page Types.

Site:

The Site option allows you to import a list of sites for exclusion and you can enter the URLs in the following conventions:

To exclude the whole site:
www.alibaba.com

To exclude the entire sub-domain:
importer.alibaba.com

To exclude the single page:
www.alibaba.com/sitemap/sitemap.html

To exclude the entire directory:
www.alibaba.com/buyeroffers/importers

You do not need to exclude a site just because it is located outside the target region for your ad. This is a common mistake. No matter where a site is located, your ad will be shown only to visitors who are located in the regions you have targeted. For instance, if your ad is targeted to Germany, your ad will be shown only to users in Germany (based on their IP address) even if the site in question originates in a different country.

Topics:

The Topics option allows you to exclude one or some of the topics given:

1. Conflict & tradegy
* Crime, police & emergency
* Death & tragedy
* Military & international conflict

2. Edgy content
* Juvenile, gross & bizarre content
* Profanity & rough language
* Sexually suggestive content

Web pages are categorized based on Google’s defined web page categorization, so in some cases ever when you have excluded a category it does not necessary guarantee that you have excluded every related web page.

Page Types:

The Page Types option lets you to select the web page types that you want to exclude:

1. Network types:
* Error pages
* Parked domains

2. User-generated content
* Forums
* Image-sharing pages
* Social networks
* Video-sharing pages

IP Address Exclusion

The IP Address Exclusion Tool simply allows you to import a list of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses for exclusion. Currently, this tool only allows you to include up to 20 IP addresses or blocks or IP addresses.

Demographic Bidding

You can also use the Demographic Bidding Tool as an effective site or web page exclusion tool, if you are running site-/placement-targeted content campaigns (instead of keyword-targeted content campaigns).

Posted in: Adwords, Contextual Advertising, Google, PPC | No Comments

Canonicalization is the process of picking the best URL when there are several choices, according to Google’s Matt Cutts. Consider canonicalization that refers to home pages like the examples below:

* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp

All of the above URLs seem to be the same URL, however, technically they are all different (the www version is essentially different from the non-www version). A web server can be set up to return totally distinct content for each of the above URLs. In such case, Google would choose to crawl only one of the URLs.

However for most sites, all of the above URLs usually return the same page. Therefore what Google sees is identical content on different URLs. If you are fortunate enough not to have run into duplicate content issues, Google picks one of the URLs and stores the others in the supplemental index.

Also, you are not optimized on consolidating all the possible pagerank scores your home page received from both external (inbound) links and your own site’s internal links.

To resolve the problems, you should consider the following:

Use Google’s webmaster tools to set the preferred URL of your home page to the one of the versions (either www or non-www). By doing this, it helps Google to identify the canonical URL. Over time, Google will only crawl the preferred version of your homepage URL.

URL consistency is important. When creating internal links you should ensure using one URL format across your site. Take my blog for example, I only use www.gordonchoi.com whenever pointing to the home page, and not the non-www version (gordonchoi.com).

If you want your homepage’s default URL to be the www version, set up a 301 permanent redirect on the non-www version. This way, when the non-www version is requested, the www version will be served to the users.

Do not use commands in your Robots.txt file to block the non-www format of the URL. This is one of the common mistakes being made by some amateur webmasters. Otherwise, Google not only will stop crawling your non-www URL but will start removing your entire site from its index.

Posted in: Google, Link Building, SEO | No Comments

Google seems to be trying continuously to improve both user experience and stickiness on its web search and PPC ads. If you use Google regularly, you could already have spotted most of the minor and major changes below. The first example is on the search box, in which it normally looks like:

Below is the extended search box. The size of the search box increases when you enter a very long search query. This allows users to see his/her entire search query when it is longer than the size of the normal search box.

The introduction of Related Searches and Related Phrases are certainly for increasing stickiness. Stickiness is the number of page views generated on a single visit to a site. For instance, a user visited a web site and viewed 20 pages before he/she exits the site altogether, the stickiness he/she generated for the website is 20.

Google first introduced Sitelinks close to the end of 2006, but also introduced Site Search recently. Sitelinks below the top natural search result are links relevant to the top domain, in which they are either sub-domains of the top domain, or they are popular web pages within the domain. With Sitelinks, users do not have to scroll down the SERP.

Site Search can improve user stickiness on Google’s web search. After running a search on a brand, users are given another opportunity to search within that’s brand’s domain.

On Google China (Guge)’s home page, several graphical links pointing to popular Google vertical sites in China have been added. Back in the beginning of 2007, Baidu’s homepage decided to go for a cleaner and simplier approach.

Videos: video.google.cn
Images: images.google.cn
News: news.google.cn
Ditu (Maps): ditu.google.cn
Blog Search: blogsearch.google.cn
Rebang (Zeitgeist): www.google.cn/rebang
Daohang (Directory start page): daohang.google.cn

With paid search most of us as advertisers usually concern about click fraud. Google has 2 types of PPC networks: “Sponsored Links” for the Search Network and “Ads by Google” for the Content Network.

Both of the text ad formats have had their clickable area reduced. Before the change, the entire area (including the background area) of these ads were clickable. For the top ads of the Sponsored Links on top of the organic search results, the clickable area has been reduced to only the headlines. For the text ads in the Content Network, only the headlines and the display URLs are clickable. The major purpose of this change was to reduce accidental clicks by users’ mistakes, but it has also certainly improved user experience.

Another change is the inclusion of the “Previous” and “Next” button feature, which allows users to browse through all contextual ads within one ad unit.

Posted in: China, Google, User Experience | No Comments

Google recently added the “Next and Previous” buttons to its contextual ad units. Now visitors are not restricted to view only one single set of ads (say normally 4 ads per set), but they can browse through all the ads by using the buttons.

For advertisers who are running Adwords content-targeting ads, this may already have an impact on their campaigns. This new feature will cause adgroups that have average positions of 5 and below to start receiving more impressions or even clicks than they used to be receiving.

Remember, Optimising for Google Adwords content-targeting campaigns is very different from optimising for search-targeting campaigns.

Read more regarding the ad format change from this Inside Adsense blog post.

Posted in: Adwords, Contextual Advertising, Google, PPC | No Comments

LinkedIn.com, the social network site for professionals, has launched Companies Beta which is essentially a company page visible to all its users. I believe a large part of this page was created through relevant LinkedIn user data. Let’s take Alibaba.com’s page as an example.

You may need to log onto your LinkedIn account before viewing the page below:

http://www.linkedin.com/companies/14160/Alibaba.com

The beta company page begins with a brief company description/summary which was provided by Capital IQ. A “flag inaccurate summary” link allows users to report to LinkedIn for any inaccurate information that appears in the summary.

Alibaba.com Limited operates as a B2B e-commerce company in the People’s Republic of China. It provides a platform connecting small and medium-sized buyers and suppliers from China and internationally. The company’s listings displayed on its online marketplaces cover a range of products and services in various industries… Alibaba.com provides online advertising services that allow branded advertisers to display online advertisements on its international and China marketplaces, including banners and other graphical or text advertisements. The company was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Hangzhou, the People’s Republic of China. Alibaba.com Limited is a subsidiary of Alibaba.com Corporation.

On the page, selected employees of the companies are displayed:

* This company’s employees who are currently connecting to you
* New hires
* Popular profiles

Popular Profiles: These are Linkedin users who are highlighted because they may be actively in the news, referenced in blogs, participating in industry groups, and/or frequently the result of searches and other activities within the Linkedin network. Users who appear on this list have the most profile views at their company.

New Hires: These are LinkedIn users who have indicated in their profile that they’ve recently joined this company.

Recent Promotions and Changes: These are LinkedIn users who have recently indicated in their profile that they’ve recently changed positions at this company.

LinkedIn respects its users’ privacy as it provides options to opt-out of notifications of status and profile changes. So users’ new statuses as new hires or recent promotions will not be announced in the network.

If you don’t want to appear in the New Hires, Recent Promotions or Popular Profiles sections of your company’s profile, go to your Profile and Status Updates preferences and select “No, do not notify anyone.”

LinkedIn only shows names of employees up to and including 3 levels (degrees) away from you.

Company Employees: This is a list of LinkedIn users in your network (up to 3 degrees away from you) who currently work at this company.

The Related Companies section is the statistics about from which companies most employees came from, and which companies most employees are connecting to:

* Career path for Alibaba.com employees before: [other companies]
* Alibaba.com employees are most connected to: [other companies]

HR officers can even post jobs and recruitment videos that will appear in the Jobs module.

People on job hunting can apply for appropriate jobs.

The Key Statistics module provides information of the company including its industry, size (number of employees), some past revenue figures and when it was established. It even gives summarized data of employees such as common job titles, top schools/universities, median age and gender, though the information shown is only based on the employees of the particular company who are in the LinkedIn network.

The information in this section about the employees of the company profiled on this page was aggregated from non-personally identifiable data of LinkedIn users who are currently employed by this company. This data only reflects estimates about this company’s employees and is not endorsed or provided by the company. For questions regarding LinkedIn Company Profiles contact us.

Previously, I have also explained how you can SEO your LinkedIn Profile.

Posted in: Internet Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Network Sites, Web 2.0 | 5 Comments

Google is updating its Adwords trademark policy in UK and Ireland that will allow any relevant ads from any advertisers to be triggered by trademarked keywords, which previously was forbidden. This new policy will be effective by 5 May 2008.

For Adwords advertisers with text ads targeting the UK and Ireland, keywords that were disabled for trademark investigation may begin triggering their ads.

However, trademark policy within ad texts will be unchanged. Though all advertisers’ ads will be allowed to appear on sponsored links for their competitors’ branded / trademarked keywords, Google will allow only trademark owners to have their trademarked brand names appear on ads. For instance,

Say “Expedia” is considered a trademark. The owner can use “Expedia” as a keyword, and can include it in the ad text. Other advertisers are allowed to use “Expedia” as a keyword, but are forbidden from using it within ad text.

The downside for trademark owners certainly is that they may face more competitions on their branded keywords. Keyword prices may be deliberately pushed up by their competitors. Bidding on keywords that are of your competitor’s brand can have negative effects on quality score, and you may require professional PPC ad copy writing to complement.

Posted in: Adwords, Google, PPC | No Comments

When you are running a site-targeted (performance-targeted) campaign on Google Adwords, Demographic Bidding is a tool that provides the options to target by gender, age, annual household income, or ethnicity. At the same time, it is also a tool to exclude certain undesirable demographics that have been causing low ROI.

Select Demographics
Choose the audience you want to target by selecting from any or all of the demographic categories provided. Audience gender, age, and household income are among the demographic categories available for selection. Pick the audience demographics that interest you, then click Get Available Placements to pick from a list of sites that match those demographic groups. Remember that by making demographic selections you are getting a narrower list of available sites.

When starting a site-targeting campaign, you first choose a site or some web pages of a site where your ads will be placed. You choose the site or web pages by one of the available options: browse categories, describe topics, list URLs or simply add the URLs that you want your ads to be shown. However, unlike keyword-targeted campaigns, you do not have an option to exclude undesirable traffic by adding negative-matched keywords.

List URLs
Enter the URLs of websites where you would like to advertise, or that represent the kind of site where you’d like to see your ad. Then click Get Available sites. If the sites you enter are part of the Google content network, you’ll be able to select them for your ads. If not, you’ll see a message telling you that they’re not available. The AdWords system will also use the sites and terms you enter to generate a list of other Google content network sites and placements that may be a good fit for your ads.

Describe Topics
Enter topics that match the content of your ads. Then click Get Available Placements to select from a list of placements that match those topics.

Browse Topics
Look through categories. Click the category or subcategory that best matches your ad, then select from a list of placements that match that category. For best results, pick the available subcategory that most precisely matches your ad. (Note: Category targeting is not yet available in all countries.)

You can use the Demographic Bidding Tool as an exclusion tool to narrow down the list of available sites or web pages. For instance,

Suppose you sell women’s basketball shoes and want your ad to be seen by 18-24 year-old females. You can restrict your ads from certain users if you think they’re not meeting your ROI goals. In the case of women’s basketball shoes, you might find that the male, 18-24 year-old demographic is receiving a significant number of impressions but not clicking-through or converting well, and decide to restrict that group.

The Demographic Bidding Beta version was first launched in January 2008 and it is now out of beta as announced by this Inside Adwords post.

Posted in: Adwords, Contextual Advertising, Google, PPC | No Comments

Adwords is to strictly enforce a new policy to all advertisers for using display URL starting from 1 April 2008, as announced in this post of Inside Adwords Blog. With the display URL policy, Adwords will no longer allow certain exceptions which will include, but will not be limited to redirects and vanity URLs, regardless of past approvals.

Example #1:

If your destination URL is www.google.com, your display URL must also be www.google.com. The following would not be acceptable display URLs for an ad for www.google.com:

www.google.co.uk - because this URL leads to a different site
www.gogle.com - even though this URL simply redirects to www.google.com it is still not acceptable
www.gooogle.com - because this URL leads to a page showing content identical to www.google.com

Example #2:

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
Landing page URL: www.google.com would be acceptable

Display URL: www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: www.trackingurl.com/google123
Landing page URL: www.trackingurl.com would not be acceptable

Example #3:

Display URLs such as the following:
sub.google.com
google.com/extratext
www.google.com/extratext

would all be acceptable for the landing page URL below, as the top-level domain of google.com is matched:
http://sub.google.com/miscellaneous

As advertisers, if you have not yet made the required changes, you will still have only several days to do so.

Posted in: Adwords, Google, PPC | 2 Comments

Selected web sites have been given Sitelinks on Google search result pages since awhile ago. Google Sitelinks are links that appear directly underneath the search result of a site and are determined by Google’s algorithms. Currently, Sitelinks are only shown for top search results.

Google usually shows 2 to 8 Sitelinks for a site.

Google usually gives Sitelinks to a web site for its main keyword in which in most case it happens to be the site’s brand name keyword. Sites that have limited daily search volume keyword on its main keyword are not given Sitelinks. The number of clicks of the site to that keyword may also be a factor.

Google seems to take a web site’s domain age into account, when considering Sitelinks inclusion for a website.

High number of backlinks pointing to a site with the main keyword in the anchor text also increases the chance for a site to be awarded Sitelinks.

By placing the links of your most important web pages close to the top of your site’s homepage increases the chance of those webpages being selected as Sitelinks.

Sitelinks are essentially additional links given by Google towards your site. It is important to understand how you can optimize your website to get this free offer from Google.

Recently Google seems to be testing another feature for selected top search results. A search box is placed right below the top search result of a site, if the site’s main keyword is searched. Certain selected sites get both Sitelinks and this new search box for their top search results, which in my option is stuffing users with too much information - the concept of directory and search at one place.

Posted in: Google, SEO | 2 Comments