On June 18^th Google announced that it was renaming its Content Network. Henceforth we’ll be placing ads on the Display Network, a name more reflective of Google’s myriad interlinked online properties, including YouTube, Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps and Blogger.

This is just the latest evolution in the digital marketing space. Over the past few months we’ve seen the introduction of new Google AdWords tools (Search Funnel, Remarketing), new advertising platforms from the competition (Apple’s iAd), new mobile devices (Apple’s iPad) and innovative new ad formats including rich media and video.

Online marketing is a jargon-rich discipline.  There’s the obtuse geeky nomenclature of search engine optimization, like H1 tags and ALT text, 301 Redirect and A/B Testing, not to mention the alphabet soup of three letter acronyms: SEO, SEM, PPC, CPM, CTR, CPA… and so on. And with the introduction of new means of outreach, we keep adding new terms to an already long Glossary of Terms, while we refine or redefine legacy terminology.

So I though it may be helpful to take stock of the world of digital marketing, including taking a fresh look at what we call “stuff” these days.

Originally the umbrella term for all activities related to helping search engines (and their users) find a website was Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Overtime, with the emergence of online paid search advertising and Social Media Marketing (SMM), SEO came to be more narrowly defined as all efforts directed at improving a website’s rank in natural (organic) search engine listings. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) emerged as the new term that referred to all the other search-related activities.

Nowadays the term SEM is often used interchangeably with terms like Internet Marketing, Digital Marketing, Paid Search Advertising and Pay-Per-Click (PPC). They are related terms, but they are not equivalent. Google took a stab at redefining some of those terms more narrowly in their newly updated certification material:

“Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of promoting and marketing a website through paid listings (advertisements) on search engines”

“Ads on most search engines operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, meaning that you pay only when a user clicks your ad, and not for the ad impression (the instance in which the ad appears on the page).”

They use the more generic term Online Advertising to refer to ad placements on other types of sites, like those on their Display Network.

So here’s a visual representation of where all the pieces fit and how they relate to each other.

There are still quasi-equivalent terms, such us Digital vs. Internet vs. Online Marketing, but with the introduction of ever-new “digital” categories, I expect this to evolve. Social Media Marketing is becoming increasingly more diversified, and is likely to evolve more nomenclature to reflect the evolution into, for e.g. Digital PR in addition to Online Reputation Management and other forms of listening to and communicating with our customers online.

Given the pace of change, I will be interested to see how this chart will compare to reality 3-6-9 months down the road. It’s an exciting time for digital marketers.

Or a Free Digital Marketing Assessment

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve doubtless heard about the troubles plaguing Apple’s new and eagerly awaited iPhone 4. Yes, it’s true. Tech giant Apple, renowned for their design acumen has released a product with a serious design flaw.

Duct Tape Fixes iPhone Flaw

The new iPhone 4, all chock full of bells and whistles that enable users to automatically gain tech/geek cred, doesn’t work so well if you touch its “sensitive” spot. The signal can be lost during normal usage. Not so good if you’re on a call with that hot prospect, your biggest client or your little Jimmy who got his ass kicked at school and is in the nurses office texting you that he’s pressing charges against Amy Goldstein tomorrow and he needs the number of the family attorney. So what’s a loyal Apple iPhone customer to do?

There Is A Solution!

Mike Gikas, Senior Editor at Consumer Reports, and his crack team of engineers and quality testers have discovered the solution: strategically placed duct tape!

Yes, it’s another valuable use for one of humankind’s most invaluable inventions!

At Confluence Digital we share your pain. We know the suffering you go through with dropped calls (thank you AT&T) and now this! We’re offering affected iPhone 4 owners a FREE ROLL of duct tape in your choice of colors. Choose from:

If you can't hold it right, do this.

• Midnight Blue
• Sassy Red
• Provocative Orange
• Classic Dull Grey
• Whatever left in the box

But Wait, There’s More!

While duct tape can cure your iPhone 4 ills, it can’t cure bad marketing. Confluence Digital goes a step further and offers a FREE DIGITAL MARKETING ASSESSMENT!

Choose from a Search Engine Visibility Report that compares your site versus two of your fiercest competitors OR our Google AdWords Review that provides money saving and performance improving recommendations.

These valuable, sanity saving offers are brought to you while supplies last. Don’t let poor engineering or search engine marketing ruin your summer. Fill out the form provided in the upper right hand corner of this web page and tell us what you need. Act now!

Turn that frown upside down. Confluence + Duct Tap = Happiness

Businesses around the world are becoming increasingly aware of the necessity of SEO to build a strong online presence. While SEO alone won’t deliver any company to all its goals, it has become an increasingly important aspect of any successful marketing strategy.  Nowadays if you want to be competitive in your space, you must consider SEO.  Regardless of whether you are a blogger or a Fortune 100 company, how you market yourself online matters to success.

There are two important areas of technical SEO work that lay the groundwork for a successful online presence. These are on-page and off-page factors that search engines such as Google and Bing will look at to rank your webpage for a given query. For example, if someone searches for “Seattle pizza”, how does Google know which page to rank first, second, third and so forth in the results. This is where SEO comes in.  Simply said, the goal of SEO is to help Google recognize that your website is the most relevant, because obviously your pizza joint is at least a half a billion times better than your competitor’s down the road.

What does a search engine look at to rank your page? Some of the more important on-page (your website and its code) ranking factors are :

-Having relevant keywords in the domain name or URL. First word is best, second is second best etc.

-Descriptive page title tags for each page

-Descriptive meta data for each page, while this is not really helpful from an SEO standpoint this is often the text description that search engines will show with your page link.

-Heading tags <h1>, <h2> etc.

-Use of relevant keywords in page copy, targeting 1-2 specific terms.

-Use of keywords in your ALT text (name) of each image you feature on each page.

-Do you have lots of content and pages? This is generally good because it indicates you as an authority and you have more chances to appear in the search results.

Off-page factors are equally important in a search engines ranking algorithm. The elements of off page factors are:

-Number and quality of inbound links. Quality=relevant and from authority sites.

-Text of the link and where it links to on your site. Do all links link go to your homepage or is there some variety in pages targeted?  Linking to various areas of your site is good for ranking as it indicates quality content across your site.

-Buying links is generally a bad idea as Google is known to penalize site who buy links from certain link sellers. Probably not worth it to your long term SEO campaign.

These basic best practices of SEO are the start to effective search rankings. It is also important to remember that at the end of the day you and Google, and Bing all have the same goals: a quality user experience through relevance. Much of SEO comes from empirical evidence but the truth is that outsiders will never know exactly how search engines rank pages as this is a closely guarded secret that continually changes as search engines seek to create a better user experience. The principle behind long term success is user driven design. Clear, easy to navigate, well organized web pages with quality content relevant to the keywords that surround your business/webpage/blog will help you rank ahead of your competition in search and in business.

SEO isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. SEO is constantly changing so that long term success will come to the website owners who continually tests and refine their strategy.

Resources:

Alleged on and off-page ranking factors

Recently two of our clients became “victims” of trademark infringement by direct competitors. We noticed competitive ads on Google and Display Network partners Business.com and Alexa.com that followed the following format:

This ad format features the use of a trademarked term in a competitive manner, a practice Google explicitly forbids:

In the U.S., we allow some ads to show with a trademark in ad text if the ad is from a reseller or from an informational site. However, if our investigation finds that the advertiser is using the trademark in the ad text in a manner which is competitive, critical, or negative, we will require the advertiser to remove the trademark and prevent them from using it in similar ad text in the future.

The ad is also potentially misleading to users who may not notice that the headline and destination URL do not match until after the click they land on the competitor’s website. They may be mistaken into thinking that the competitor is the owner or reseller of the trademarked product.

In both instances we dispatched polite, yet firm “cease and desist” requests directly to the marketing departments of both companies, and in both cases the matter was immediately resolved.

So why (and how) did this happen? In mid-2009 Google revised its policy on the use of trademarked terms as keywords and in ad text. The company essentially espoused a universal policy on non-involvement in disputes over the use of trademarked terms as keywords and, under specific circumstances, authorized the displaying of trademarked terms in ad text. Naturally, many advertisers took advantage of the policy shift, and judging just by the number of Google AdWords forum posts reporting a similar scenario to the one I described above, “mistakes were made”.

While it would be easy to assume that all those advertisers were purposefully behaving in an unethical manner, the more plausible explanation is that the culprit was Google’s handy Dynamic Keyword Insertion feature. When used correctly, Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a very useful tool that helps AdWords advertisers make their text ads more relevant to searchers. To activate the feature, the advertiser simply needs to place a snipped of code in the ad text. Each time the ad is shown in search results, AdWords inserts the exact query that triggered the ad in its place.

The tool offers great flexibility. The keyword can be inserted into the headline, the first or second line of text, post “slash” in the display URL and at the end of the destination URL and even appear more than once in the same ad (for e.g., headline and destination URL).

So let’s say you’re selling women’s shoes and you want to move your summer inventory, you could create an ad group with the following group of keywords:
women’s sandals, women’s flip-flops, women’s peep-toes, women’s clogs, women’s espadrilles, women’s summer shoe styles, brand women’s summer shoes, etc. and configure your ad as follows:

Buy {KeyWord: Women’s Summer Shoes}
We Carry All Your Favorite Brands.
Satisfaction Guaranteed!
www.Example.com
destination URL: http://www.Example.com/?kw={keyword:nil}

The default display term is Women’s Summer Shoes, and it will be shown in case the keyword that triggers the causes the line of text to go over character limit (25 in headline, 35 in first, second and display URL).

Advertisers can even select various capitalization options by modifying the code, for e.g.:

In the trademark infringement case, the ad format was most likely as follows:

{Keyword:default text}
It does it all. It’s cool. Get it here.
www.CompetitiveURL.com

Bidding on your competitor’s trademarks is a great way to ensure your ads are displayed alongside your competitor’s and if you’re an authorized reseller of a brand, it makes sense for you to say so in your ad copy. Both those uses of trademarked terms are allowed under Google’s revised AdWords policy. So in order to stay within the limits of what’s allowed (and play nice), if you’re bidding on competitive trademarks, stick to straightforward ad copy and leave them out of the keyword list for your Dynamic Keyword Insertion ads.

Recently, the Confluence Digital team descended on the SMX Advanced conference right here in our own turf in Seattle. Here’s my top 10 list of things that I learned while attending the SEO track, in no particular order.

1. Bing is becoming a consideration in the search engine market, especially with the Yahoo merger.
2. Penalties do not usually come from a single infraction, but from an accumulation of issues. Think “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
3. Several speakers, including Matt Cutts, pushed video sitemaps, especially with the new Google TV vertical that will be coming out later this fall. Google will be giving more weight to video sitemaps in the future.
4. One of my favorite tools for understanding back-links, Yahoo Site Explorer, is likely to stay around under the Bing banner. (yay!)
5. Real-time search results have ranking factors similar to Web pages. Factors include:
   • Quality of followers
   • Freshness
   • Frequency of tweets
   • Frequency of retweets
6. Today readers are social-media savvy. Write website content that will appeal to sharing and to Facebook and Twitter users. Make the content easy to share with Sharing options right on the page, but you don’t need to add all the options. Just pick the five that are appropriate to your audience and use those.
7. The latest Google infrastructure update, called Caffeine, is a backend update. Instead of crawling the Web and then updating the Google index later, indexing occurs immediately after every document crawl. This creates an index that is more up-to-date and more responsive to world events. Caffeine also improved JavaScript processing.
8. The so-called May Day update, on the other hand, is an algorithm update. If you notice a drop in the number of pages getting search referrals (long-tail traffic), you could be impacted. To recover, strive to add high-quality inbound links to those pages and make sure it is linked to a relevant strong page on your site.
9. To help your images get indexed by Image Search, add them to your sitemap. Up to 1,000 images per page can be added to your sitemap.xml. Image information can include:
   • Image URL
   • Image caption
   • Geographic location of the image
   • Image title
   • Link to the image license
10. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz did a point-by-point comparison of ranking factors in Bing and Google, which is also recapped on their blog. The study concluded that these two search engines have very similar ranking criteria. The big difference, of course, is Bing’s much smaller search volume.

All-in-all, SMX Advanced was an awesome event. Many thanks to the organizers who worked so hard to make it all happen.

I was test-Googling some keywords for a client project when something caught my eye. As I refreshed the page, the right hand column slid down and new ads combining a thumbnail image and a snippet of hyperlinked, keyword-rich text popped up.

Google testing new search results formats

No surprise there. Google has been openly testing new search ad formats for more than a year. Some sponsored e-Commerce site ads now include up to three relevant links. Natural search results have also been evolving. They now frequently integrate video or image thumbnails.

A couple months ago searchers looking for images or videos had to click the relevant link at the top of the page to find what they needed. Now the most relevant video or image results show up integrated into “regular” search results. And if you want to see more, the new colorful menu in the left hand margin makes navigating to additional results more user friendly.

This evolution towards more diversified search results makes a lot of sense. Let’s say you’re interested in learning how to build a paper airplane, wouldn’t a YouTube video of someone making one be more relevant than a static, step-by-step description? After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then what is a video worth? Similarly, if you’re looking to buy a raincoat, an ad featuring a local retailer showing an image of a raincoat and including a link to the map of the location is likely to be more relevant than the best text ad.

However, it seems that in recent weeks and months the changes have been coming at a faster rate. I believe that this evolution in Google search is more than reflective of the company’s desire to please users. Yes, there’s no doubt that Google is interested in increasing relevance of search results. It’s good for searchers, and it’s good for Google, since it brings searchers back to its properties. But besides driving greater relevance and achieving ever-closer integration with its YouTube and e-Commerce properties, I believe that what we’re seeing reflects Google’s efforts to maintain its market leadership. Google has been the undisputed leader in the search space since… the beginning of search, but as the story of giants like IBM (defeated by upstart Apple) illustrate, you can’t maintain market share on momentum and hubris alone. And with the anticipated unveiling of the integrated Yahoo-Bing search algorithm expected at year’s end bolstered by the increasing prominence of Facebook as the “4th search engine”, with its search results supplied by Bing, Google may be wisely hedging its bets and investing into a better user experience to maintain its “King of the Hill” status for a while longer.

Two of our clients recently received very authentic-looking email alerts from “Google” informing them that their AdWords campaign had stopped running. The message included instructions on what to do to fix the problem. And of course, the last step of the “fix” involved harvesting their login and password.

Here’s the message one client received:

Example AdWords phishing email

Despite the spelling errors, like “jighly (sic.) relevant”, the message is written in SEM-ese and sounds official and the link the recipient is asked to click looks OK at first glance: “http://adwords.google-lc.com/accounts/signin.html”.

A review of the online buzz on the subject reveals that phishing attempts targeting AdWords users are quite common and have been a problem for at least two years.

Phishing attempts come with different content, but they appear to take two basic approaches. The most common is the “your campaigns/ads have stopped running” type of message, like the one above, suggesting something is wrong with the AdWords account. Other users were sent messages suggesting that their payment to Google was not processed, requesting the user to resubmit. Clicking the link then took the user to an authentic looking page where they were asked to re-enter and re-submit their payment information.

Here are some subject lines that recipients have reported:
• your adwords google account is stoped (sic)
• account reactivation.
• please re-activate your account.
• please re-submit your payment information.
• please submit your payment information.
• please update your billing information.
• reactivate your adwords google account.
• submit your payment information.
• update your billing information.
• update your payment information.
• you have one or more alerts.
• your account with google adwords.
• your ads are not running.
• your ads have been suspended.
• your ads in this account are not running.
• your payment didn’t succeed\

So how does one identify a phishing attempt?

If you receive any unsolicited message asking for your password or other sensitive information claiming to be from Google AdWords, assume that it is a phishing attempt.

Some other telltale signs of a phishing message include:
1. Urgent tone, demanding an immediate response to a failed payment, stopped campaign, ad copy not running, or something else “broken”.
2. A request for a login into the account to “verify” some data or “fix” the problem, or a similar request for personal information such as a login, a password or payment information.
3. Funny formatting, awkward grammar, spelling errors, unusual indentation an over-long “from” address.
4. If the message landed in your Junk Mail or Spam folder, it’s suspect.
5. If you can’t put your finger on it but something just seems fishy, it most likely is a “phish”.

What to do if you’ve received a fraudulent message?

Google treats phishing attempts very seriously; so if you receive a suspicious email claiming to be from AdWords, report it to Google:

What do I do if I receive a suspicious email claiming to be from AdWords?
If you’ve received a phishing email that attempts to fraudulently collect passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information, please report the suspicious email immediately. […]
(The complete article can be found by clicking here)

You can also email the message directly to Google at phishing@google.com.

What to do if you clicked a link and are concerned that your AdWords account may have been compromised?

If you believe your account has been compromised, contact Google immediately.

Given how long this has been going on, AdWords phishing is most likely here to stay. So stay safe and pass the message on to your colleagues and clients.

My memory is a bit fuzzy now but it was probably late 1994 when I began immersing myself in the online world. I was working in U.S. sales for a manufacturer of high tech electronic equipment. Back then all there was were text based browsers (remember Archie & Veronica?). Next came GNN, Internet In A Box, AOL, Netscape and the rest as they say is history. I wasn’t a digital marketing expert then and I’m not now. I’m a marketer who happens to be comfortable with data, emerging trends and new technology.

I’ve been employed as a digital marketer for a while and over the years (16) quite a few folks have asked, “How do I get started in online marketing?” In my head I’m thinking, “ you really want advice from me?,” but I’m also humbled to asked. Like I said, I’m no expert. I’ve just been banging my head against the wall longer than most. When it seemed like everyone else jumped into real estate after the dot.com crash, I kept banging my head with online and media start-ups.

So here are five opinions about what I think a traditional marketer needs to realize if they want to get into digital.

1. The Website is the store front, brochure & cash register
This may seem obvious but the website needs to convey the brand’s personality. It’s the front door to a business and the checkout stand. It’s a brand’s voice and ear to a global market. Yet there are still many many firms, that spend more on the plants in their lobby than invest in their website. Search engine optimization (SEO) enables your site to be found. Web usability helps visitors navigate your site to find relevant information, products or services they’re looking for. And website analytics enables marketers to understand which tactics are most successful and optimize the experience to better serve visitors. In the end, it’s only about the users, not your CEO.

2. Core elements of digital advertising marketing
There’s going to be more than a few who’ll probably disagree with me here but…whatever. You don’t need online display ads (i.e. banners, rich media ads, etc.). Your digital marketing program needs to include paid search. Start a program right after you’ve refined the website into a decent user experience. Google AdWords is not only extremely effective at targeting even the “nichest” of audiences, it’s market research on steroids. That said, paid search and display can yield better overall results when properly used in conjunction with each other. Think of paid search as direct response that can drive brand engagement with your website. Display is like that annoying billboard you see every day on your commute. You hate seeing it but you remember what it’s advertising. If you haven’t started, begin dabbling and experimenting with social media. Social is the new word-of-mouth and it’s not going away. Get in it. Make mistakes and learn.

3. Always be testing
Yeah I know testing has been around as long as marketing. But testing online enables near real-time feedback at a fraction of the cost. I feel it’s better to be 80% right and faster to market than strive to eliminate all uncertainty. Finding out something isn’t working is great! You’re that much closer to finding the right answer. Marketers in the digital space need to be comfortable with numbers, analysis and yes, spreadsheets. If you’re not testing, failing, analyzing and learning you’re not marketing. Test creative, test acquisition channels, test product mixes on your site, test keywords, messaging, etc. Test everything you can!

4. Make sure you close the loop
In general, people want to give their opinions and they want to be heard. Today there are numerous opportunities to close the loop with customers. Just a few of the mechanisms to stay in touch with customers include: email, surveys, forums & blogs, Twitter, Facebook (and other social media), online communities, etc. Customers and marketers have the ability to communicate with each other. There’s no excuse not to. Explore these options and learn which may be best for your company. Not every brand is right for every option but when you interact you gain understanding.

5. Keep investing in yourself – Seminars, network, consume & share knowledge
The digital world changes constantly. In fact, the only constant is change. Whether it’s the latest flavor of the month or changes within tried & true vehicles such as search, what is today will change tomorrow. There will likely be certain topics that appeal to you more than others, dive deep into these whatever they are. Then there’ll be the secondary interest. Keep on top of these with regular blog reading. Then there will be the tertiary interest. Keep a list of websites bookmarked that you can turn to when needed.

Seminars are available that provide either overviews or deep dives on any topic you can imagine. Think about attending a seminar at least once or twice a year. If you live in a metro area there’s likely a local special interest group that meets or a chapter of the American Marketing Association.

Nothing earth shattering, right? Stories still need telling, messages need communicating and Awareness, Interest, Desire & Action still count. Only the channels have changed. Well there is one thing that’s changed. What you do online, stays online. Forever.

I have been assisting a friend of mine with her digital marketing needs. She’s a therapist and in the process of having a website developed for her practice. She knows she needs to have a presence online. She understands that she needs a website that is user friendly, follows SEO best practices and can be easily found through keyword search queries on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Even knowing all that, she is self-admittedly generally uncomfortable around all things technology related, online or off. And given the sorry state of most therapist websites (and I looked at many), this lack of tech savvy is something she shares with many of her colleagues.

So, last week my friend shared with me a letter, in PDF format, that she’s received via email from Shady SEM* (Shady) a company offering paid search services. She told me that the letter was a follow-up to of a cold call from the company. The letter states that Shady would guarantee my friend a top spot in paid search advertising on Google and Yahoo. It goes on to say that set-up in Google will cost my friend a mere $50 unlike the $79.95 the “competition” charges. Google’s name in rainbow colors is sprinkled throughout the text. Nowhere does the letter mention cost of media. Not a word about cost per click or strategy or keyword research or anything substantial. Just the guarantee of a top placement, the promise of adjustments (management?) if necessary, and a $50 fee.

My friend actually asked me whether the letter was from Google, seeing that Google’s name was everywhere. Don’t laugh. Your mom would probably ask the same question. Mine would. Really. Like I suspected, my friend was nearly misled into thinking that the $50 would buy her a high-ranking ad on Google. She was only “nearly” misled because we had talked about paid search and the associated costs, and so she thought the offer sounded “too good to be true”. But had she not known me, she admitted that she probably would have gone for it.

I don’t know about you, but this situation makes me mad. It is obvious to me that Shady is deliberately targeting non-tech-savvy verticals, fishing for naïve business owners who want to advertise their services or products on Google, know that a high placement is desirable, but the rest is mystery to them. When they bite, what happens next? Yes, we all know that it’s possible to pay one’s way to the top, but at what price? And how come Shady is not upfront about those costs? I wonder, how does Shady handle it when the unsuspecting business owner gets that invoice from Google? I can imagine a telephone call to Shady answered with “Oh, we’re sorry, obviously media cost is extra… Really, you didn’t know? Oh… No, we’re not charging that fee, Google charges that fee…”

At this very minute I’m wondering how many business owners like my friend may have been duped by Shady, and how many companies like Shady are out there. Hundreds? Thousands? And why should I (we) even worry about this? After all, it’s all buyer beware out there, no matter what the good or service is, right? So why should we all, as online marketers, be concerned about a few (I hope) bad apples among us? Well, to me it’s obvious. Unscrupulous and unethical members of our community (yes, sadly, they will be viewed as members of OUR community) damage our collective reputation. A business owner burned by Shady or a similar outfit is likely to have negative feelings about digital marketers in general and malign us all as a result. So WE get a bad name because of THEM.

So what should we as an industry, as a community of online marketing professionals do to address this? Form our own Better Business Bureau? Report companies like Shady to the existing BBB? Should we blog about them openly instead of covertly, legal repercussions be damned? Should we create a “Black List” or a Digital Marketing Code of Ethics we can all publicize and sign on to? Or should we just educate the public as much as possible about what we do, making sure that business owners like my friend become informed consumers? What do you think I should do right now? What would you do?

P.S. When I searched for Shady on Google, they don’t show up. Go figure…

*Not their real name, but it should be.