I recently spoke with a good college friend who now works at Fathom SEO, out of Cleveland, Ohio. We discussed objections to participating in social media, the perils of cutting online marketing budgets, ways to gauge website health beyond rankings, and the state of the SEM industry.

You can read the full interview on Fathom’s blog. I encourage you to check it out and leave comments, especially if you have stories that illustrate or refute any of my points.

For instance, I have recently been giving a lot of thought to the effects of the economic downturn on marketing budgets and allocation of funds. Tangentially, I’ve also been considering the role of risk in our profession. This question is one example where those two topics came together:

Give me the best reasons why companies that need to trim advertising budgets in these tough economic times should not cut their Internet marketing funds.

The best reason not to cut your internet marketing funds is because it has been repeatedly proven that the companies who cut marketing during recessions lose market share to companies who don’t.

This is from a recent MediaPost article that puts it pretty succinctly:

“It’s well-documented how companies leverage downturns in the economy to effectively market themselves. In the 1970s, marketers like Revlon and Philip Morris increased their advertising to gain market share. Today, companies like Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Verizon, News Corp and PepsiCo all increased their first-quarter ad spending.

The typical response to cut back on ad spending when the economy slows down is understandable. However, advertisers with strong brands, stable monetary resources and compelling value propositions can take share from their weaker competitors by effectively targeting their advertising.”

That doesn’t mean you need a huge pile of cash, either. These days it’s cheaper than ever to retain or expand your marketing during tough times.

How much do you think Bill Marriott’s blog is doing to attract customers? How much do you think Frank at Comcast has insulated the company from (more) online disasters? We’re talking, what – minutes a day for Bill and one salary for Frank? And their worth to the company and brand is through the roof.

Creative companies will not need to risk their market share during this or any recession. They will need to be brave and creative, sure, but the online channel wasn’t meant for the timid anyway.

Go to Fathom’s blog to read my full interview with Paul. And please let me know if this Q&A was helpful or not. Thanks for reading.

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So what’s the down-side? Can paid search actually hurt you and your brand?

The answer is a resounding yes. Done right, paid search advertising is one of the easiest ways to increase knowledge of your product or brand. But done poorly, it can cause your marketing budget to hemorrhage and turn your customers against you.

There are two ways that your paid search could be detrimentally effecting your brand.

Being Where You Shouldn’t Be

Online search advertising works because you decide what words are going to cause your ad to appear. If you are a high-end coffee seller, you would not only bid on the word “coffee,” but also “Kona” and “Jamaican Blue Mountain.” You want to select any relevant word that would lead the right kind of customers to your product.

But most retailers don’t use a fairly common feature of search engines that allows you to skip mistaken or misleading search terms.

The image to the right shows a recent page I was visiting on Occam’s Razor – the philosophy that every problem can be solved by slicing it down to its simplest incarnation. So imagine my surprise when I saw a Norelco ad in the right column – not the razor I was looking for!

Similarly, the author of the PrettyLittleGirls blog tells how a recent NPR story on African-Americans women with eating disorders featured a Weight Watchers ad directly beside the story. This is a prime example of how an innocuous advertiser damages their reputation. Don’t be where you shouldn’t be.

Not Being Where You Should Be

Likewise, you miss out on prime opportunities when your ads aren’t where they can do the most good. And if you don’t think like customers, potential customers, or detractors, your paid search will languish.

When Naomi Campbell danced with lizards in a Super Bowl ad to the Thriller music, Sobe Water expected people to remember their brand name. They didn’t bid on words like “dancing lizards” even though that’s what customers would remember when they visited Google the day after the game.

If you think potential customers always spell your company’s name correctly, you are sorely mistaken. Are you bidding on misspellings or are you letting all of those customers slip through your fingers?

Finally, not everyone is going to love your company (yet). Your best option is to confront this head-on. Bid on phrases like “[your company] sucks” and you can begin converting people from complainers to customers. Don’t believe me? Search for any company’s name with “sucks” after it. Do you see any company ads seeking to change minds? That is a missed opportunity.

The Gist

Don’t waste your money by advertising in stupid places. And don’t miss out on opportunities because you didn’t think like your audience. It sounds simple, but many companies make these same mistakes every day.

First, start with your title. There are 3 things that are especially important to remember:

1. Be descriptive, not clever – Write your title using words that describe your topic, even at the risk of sounding boring. When I was preparing a post about the iTouch, BG suggested that I call it “Steve Jobs Bytes.” Pretty good, right? However, we need to think about what words the person searching for information would use. “Steve Jobs Sucks” has been the most common search phrase leading people to my blog since I started.
2. Keywords, keywords, keywords – Your title is one of the most important factors in determining search ranking. Pack in commonly searched words on your topic.
3. Be concise – Remember that your title will also serve as your subject line for anyone with RSS or with services like Feedburner. Conventional wisdom recommends keeping a subject line to 50 characters or less (this is the amount that generally shows up across the spectrum of email services). If you can’t get under 50 characters, at least make those first 50 especially intriguing!

There are also important rules to keep in mind about your main content that will help you rank high in online search.

1. Don’t try to entertain – Spiders search only the first couple paragraphs of each post, so keep introductory stories and jokes short. Your extensive metaphor about Paul Revere’s ride in a blog about human communication won’t help you show up earlier in your subject. Instead, you will show up whenever someone searches for his name or The Revolutionary War. Likewise, if you ease in your audience with an Aristocrats-style joke, expect to suffer the search consequences.
2. Smart links – There are two aspects to keep in mind in regards to links. A) Use links. it shows you have depth and are connected to a larger community. Spiders see this as a good thing. B) Use anchor text to your advantage. In the “don’t try to entertain” section above, the word “Aristocrats” is the anchor text – it is the word to which the link is harnessed. Again, don’t try to be too clever! Spiders read these to determine what you’re writing about.
3. Be Opportunistic – Feel free to use commonly searched terms. When I posted about the marketing at the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana show, you can bet I used those words in the title. Since then, I continue to get a handful of readers every day who find me through search.

Do you know an aspiring blogger? How about a college student or small business owner who needs help dipping a toe into the online marketing water? Forward them this post and ask them to subscribe.

Good luck optimizing for search!

A bounce rate is when someone comes to your site and immediately leaves. They bounce off of your website for whatever reason. A bounce is undesirable – you want people to come and stay on your website! Bounce is the opposite of sticky.

Time vs. Pages

I had always understood bounce determined by time – that this figure was measured from people leaving a site in a certain increment (usually 2, 5, or 10 seconds). So I was surprised when I read in Website Magazine that they asserted that bounce rate “is calculated by dividing the number of total page visits by those visits that did not result in an additional page view.”

This seems insignificant, but really there is a huge gap. True, both methods measure engagement – how much your visitors care and want to get involved with your website (in the case of bounce, the answer is “not much”). However, the magazine’s definition is critically flawed (and I don’t mean to pick on Website Magazine – many others define bounce rate the same way).

If bounce is determined by page – measuring the amount a given page is the last page viewed against the aggregate number of times that given page was the first page viewed – this does not mean the user was instantly turned off. Co-worker Mia described this page-derived metric as indicating “not an unsuccessful visit, but unsuccessful engagement.”

For instance, I can search a site, take several minutes to read and digest a page’s information, be satisfied, and leave. This wasn’t an unpleasant visit – I got the information I was looking for – but it was unsuccessful in getting me interested in what else the site had to offer. Shame on the marketer for not including links or other content that might entice me to another page, or offering some reason to further explore that given topic. But that does not mean the content or design was flawed in some way. In this manner, I think it’s clear that determining bounce rate by last page is inherently flawed.

However, the time-derived metric is incredibly handy. Robust metrics engines like WebTrends can be programmed to measure any increment of time on a given page (though you’ll probably have to ask your IT guy for help – the usual default setting only measures in minutes which isn’t small enough for our purposes).

So, what can I do (and what does Jesus have to do with SEO)?

This uber-geeky battle of the bounce rates might not mean much to you – you’re probably interested in ways to fix high bounce rates. Let’s look at some common problems that might be plaguing your website.

1. Bad design: If your website design looks cheap, people will logically think the content is cheap as well. Make sure your design is professional – check with an expert and ask others’ opinions (if you’re on a tight budget, use SurveyMonkey or another free tool to send around to friends and family). One important note: there is often confusion over cheap vs. simple when it comes to design. Google is simple and it works. Sites trying to sell you pirated DVDs from China often look cheap and it doesn’t work. Even useful sites like Jakob Nielson’s walk the line (though he’s likely proving a point about usability, so he gets a pass). Use your best judgment.
2. Bad content: People can tell when they’re on the wrong site. Maybe it wasn’t what they were looking for. Or maybe your misspellings or wacky fonts or wrong information instantly turned them off.
3. Bad site architecture: Think about this from the user’s perspective. I worked with a client whose homepage (i.e. www.company.com) was where user’s had to click whether they wanted the American or European versions of the site. They lost a fifth of all traffic due to this terrible landing page. Enable your visitors to get the right information quickly and you will have a better bounce rate.
4. SEO: Search engines crawl certain information – title, header tags, first couple paragraphs. If you are overly clever or leave the crux of your argument at the bottom, the right audience isn’t going to find it. If Jesus had been a blogger, he would have had SEO woes. The parable of the mustard seed would have brought in gardeners and horticulturists – not exactly the point of the story.

Homework

For more detailed directions, check out Avinash Kaushik’s wonderful post at Occam’s Razor. He skims over the time vs. page argument that I wrote about, but he delves into some great suggestions for finding out more about your traffic and improving bounce rates. I especially recommend #2 (Measure the bounce rate for your traffic sources) and #4 (Measure the bounce rate of your AdWords, AdCenter, YSM (PPC) campaigns).

Many companies, especially small business owners, think they don’t have the time to properly measure metrics. The truth is that they can’t afford not to.

It’s logical that you need the right audience at the right time in the right place. Bounce rates are a perfect way to determine whether that’s occurring. Potential business could be floating to other websites instead of yours. Don’t be the metrics fool.

I could have bookmarked the URLs of company’s whose ads I enjoyed or told my friends about cool microsites I experienced, but I didn’t because the web was largely forgotten in this year’s ads. URLs were printed small and almost always at the end of the ad, there was only one example of user generated content, few (if any) microsites to continue the experience after the game, and generally poor use of search. What a waste of $2.7M.

Michael Estrin of iMedia Connection has a good wrap-up and several interviews of note. The question he pursues: where was the web? From Estrin’s article: “It was like we went backwards this year,” says Sean Cheyney, VP of marketing and business development at AccuQuote. “It’s like we’re moving back into silos. I was surprised that companies didn’t do more integration. The web was an afterthought for most of the ads.”

Beyond the 30-second Spot

AOL’s Annual Super Bowl Sunday Ad Poll ranked the Bud Light Dalmation-Clydesdale-Rocky ad was America’s favorite, yet it did not even have the requisite web address at the end. Here are a few quick ideas of ways you could have capitalized on this success (call me for more – my freelance rates are very reasonable):

• Contest to name the Dalmatian and Clydesdale
• Start a rivalry between Bud and Bud Light (represented by the dog and horse) similar to the Bud Bowls of the 90s
• MySpace page wraps in spots (Dalmatian) and tough-guy horse stuff (Clydesdale)
• Facebook app that allows you to send a Bud Light to a friend
• Advertising tie-in with the new Rambo movie (I imagine there’s audience cross-over with Rocky)
• Jab back at the new Miller Lite spot featuring…Dalmatians and Clydesdales
• Create a site where you integrate this ad with other Bud Light Super Bowl ads (have the dog breathing fire, the horse flying, etc)

Budweiser, what do you pay these marketing guys? Hire me or any 15 year old and you’ll get more web marketing bang-for-your-buck.

Failure to Launch

Any marketer worth their snuff – nay, conscious in the last year or two – knows that search is an integral part of any campaign. So, why this MediaWeek report:

“70 percent of Super Bowl advertisers bought some paid search ads on either Google, Yahoo, MSN – up close to 20 percent versus last year. But just 6 percent of advertisers used their 30-second spots to direct viewers to the Web, and the vast majority (93 percent) failed to buy search ads for alternative terms that were related to their ads, such as their spokesperson’s names, slogans or taglines.”

MediaWeek is reporting on a Reprise Media scorecard that goes into more detail. I find it amazing that roughly 93 percent (of the 70 percent who bought ads) failed to think of these ads from the user’s perspective. Your uncle Jimmy had knocked back a six-pack and was in the grip of a food coma when he saw Naomi Campbell dancing with a bunch of lizards. When he stumbles to the computer, he is not going to search for SoBe Lifewater. He’s going to search for “hot model and dancing lizards.” Little surprise that SoBe also ranked as a “fumble” on Reprise Media’s scorecard.

I Get By With a Little Help From My…Oh, Forget It

Only Doritos had the cojones to use user generated content. Despite it being ranked near the bottom, I thought the ad was okay. Doritos had a nice intro to the commercial, but I would have loved to see it end with the singer crunching into a Dorito. Cheesy, perhaps, but so is the product. My message to Frito-Lay/PepsiCo (who own Doritos): Don’t be rash in firing your advertising company. It is better to work with someone willing to take the big risks and use the medium that appeals to your audience. These are the folks with the potential to blow people out of the water.

Also, not a single advertiser drove viewers to their MySpace or Facebook page – there was zero social networking involved. Believe me, this isn’t because people aren’t using Facebook anymore.

Fox did drive people to www.myspace.com/superbowlads though, which is a nice way of increasing the ads value with a measurable online component. Of course, for $2.7M, I’d be wanting a little something extra too.

No one is complaining about a game of two huge franchises in the largest media markets where one of the teams has the chance to have a perfect season (and finally shut up the ’72 Dolphins). But if you’re an advertiser and next year pits the Titans versus the Buccaneers (no offense guys, but come on), you might want to start thinking about your other options. Joe over at Junta42 has some great ideas for how to spend all that cash.