Latest Inteligence From the Field

Introducing “Where I Rank” – Free Objective Rank Tracking

Posted on 11 Apr, 2012 in Custom Development

Without data, any online marketing effort is doomed to fail. As marketers, we don’t have the luxury of betting on feelings to perform for us, we need data. Now, you’ll be able to check your rankings objectively, in near real time. Introducing “Where I Rank”.

Rank Tracking Tool WhereIRank.com

What is it?

Where I Rank is a simple web app that takes a keyword, your domain or internal page link, and then emails you minutes later with a simple ranking report telling you what position that keyword ranks in Google and Bing. There are many different ways you can use this:

  • Performance Bonuses – When you rank a clients site to a certain position, you get a bonus. However, you’ll need a trusted and objective third party like Where I Rank.
  • Personalized Results – Sometimes, it’s difficult for people to believe they actually rank in a certain spot when Google’s “Personalized Results” shows them on the first page and they actually rank page 5.
  • Verify your existing rank tracking system’s ranking results – is it accurate?

What Makes it Different from Others?

  • More Accurate Results – Because of our affiliation with industry leading partners Authority Labs we’re able to provide more accurate results by collecting the individual pages of search results in sets of 10 instead of one block of 100. This allows you to see more accurate rankings for your keywords.
  • Full URLs not just Domain – Most tools only allow you to check the domain itself and not subdomains or full links to a blog post or internal page. That’s useful to determine where individual pages and posts rank for your keywords.
  • Fast Results – Accuracy and speed is the name of the game. If a keyword you’re looking for isn’t immediately available, of which tens of thousands are, you can put in your email and get the result sent within a few minutes. You can also keep your browser window open and we’ll refresh the page when your results are ready!
  • Google AND Bing Results – We have the ability to give you the results for Google and Bing with the same speed and accuracy so why wouldn’t we?

Where I Rank is free and available immediately for everyone to use starting today. Enjoy!

Impact of Google Adwords Quality Score on Cost-Per-Click

Posted on 19 Jan, 2012 in Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

Before Google implemented quality scores for search advertising, Google searches were overrun with irrelevant ads that linked to sites with little content.  Any marketer could bid on nearly any term and show in the paid results and placement was simple: higher CPC bids equalled higher ad rank.  This created an overall poor search experience for the user.  Google eventually improved ad quality by being the first search engine to assign quality scores, which attempt to measure ad relevance.

Instead of the highest paid search position being awarded to the highest CPC bidder, Google’s new Ad Rank (AR) is based on both CPC bid and quality score (QS):

AR = Bid x QS

The bid is set by the advertiser, however the quality score is assigned by Google. Although there are a myriad of factors that impact quality score, the four that advertisers can easily control are:

  • Relevance of the keyword to the ad copy
  • Relevance of the the keyword to the landing page copy
  • Relevance of the ad copy to the landing page copy
  • Historical click-through rate (Google assumes that if your ad is clicked frequently for a particular search query, the user sees it as relevant)

Although this means significantly more work for the online marketer, it results in a major advantage for the marketer that is willing to do the work.  Here is an example of three different advertisers bidding on the same search term:

Google Adwords Ad Rank Algorithm

As you can see, the highest bidder (Advertiser C) is going to end up in the first paid search position.  Advertiser A’s ad will show first and with a bid that is 25% lower than Advertiser C’s bid.

How much will each advertiser actually pay?  The actual cost of each click is determined by the following formula:

Actual Cost = ( Ad Rank of the Position Below / Quality Score of Your Ad ) + $0.01

Here is what each of the advertisers above will actually pay per click:

Google Adwords Ad Cost Algorithm

Although Advertiser A has the highest Cost-Per-Click to be in position #1 in this case, the really interesting observation is the relationship between Advertisers B and C.  Advertiser B shows higher in the search results that Advertiser C, yet Advertiser B will pay less than half of what Advertiser C will par per click.  This is all due to the fact that Advertiser B has a significantly higher quality score.

Let’s see what would happen if Advertiser A raised his quality score to 10:

Google Adwords - Ad Quality Score Affects Cost

If Advertiser A raised his Google Adwords quality score to 10, he would realize a reduction in cost per click of nearly 30%.  When you are dealing with budgets in the millions of dollars annually, that could make an enormous impact on the bottom line.

So now you know that higher quality scores lead to better rankings and lower advertising costs.  Here are the simple things you can do right now to improve your Google Adwords quality scores:

  • Reorganize your campaigns into small, tightly targeted ad groups for improved relevance
  • Write targeted ads that include your target keyword in the title, body, and URL (if possible)
  • Utilize multiple landing pages.  The landing page should have a significant density of your target keywords for a particular ad group.  If all of your ads point to your home page, you are probably doing it wrong.
  • Include a clear call to action in your ad copy.  This improves Click-Thru-Rate which improves quality scores over time.

Improved Relevance

= More Clicks at Lower CPC

= More Conversions at Lower CPA

= Higher ROI on Your Ad Budget.

Now get to work…

UPDATE: Thanks to Tom for pointing out a typo in the diagram; last column QS and AR should have been 4.0, not 3.0

Why You Can’t Do Adwords Like Us

Posted on 18 Jan, 2012 in Pay-Per-Click Campaigns

The world is full of light sources, and plenty of good uses for various types. You need to search for a wanted person from the helicopter? Spotlight will work just fine. You want to illuminate a room, 100 Watts of incandescence will do you just fine. You want to find your way through the woods, use a flashlight. You want to cut steel? Get your ass a laser.

The difference between a laser and any of the other sources is focus. You get those photons into an aligned focused state and powerful things can happen. You can cut things, read data off a disc, annoy the hell out of everyone in a movie theater, you name it.

Real change, real success, only comes as a product of extreme focused attention. If you are trying to succeed at 7 or 8 different things at once, odds are you’re going to get a handful of flashlights – illuminating some of the things going on, but not really doing anything powerful. Focus everything on one project, give it your entire attention, every waking moment you can sustain. It’s not a 100% guarantee to succeed, but odds are that you’ll get a laser every once in a while that changes your world.

Do one thing, and do it 100%. If it isn’t worth everything you have, then is it worth doing?

Vuurr brings a laser like focus to the way we manage our clients’ accounts to grow their business. It’s what we do, it’s what we breathe. It’s why we say “no” to more clients than we say “yes” to, so that we can keep that focus and make sure that we are able to be focused on the right things.

Learning HTML & CSS with Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS Framework

Posted on 17 Jan, 2012 in Custom Development

Twitter Bootstrap CSS Framework

We recently brought on a new employee who expressed interest in beginning frontend development, but only had minimal knowledge of HTML and CSS. They’d been frustrated with the standard tutorials that attempted to explain each single tag, and weren’t interested in continuing. On a whim (but apparently good guess) I suggested they continue working with HTML but immediately include Twitter’s Bootstrap CSS Framework while learning and developing.

The result was astounding. In three weeks we turned a college student into a junior frontend developer.

We found that by simply having something look nice and working from an incredible example page with great documentation, the learning process went much smoother, faster, and resulted in higher quality work. Now after just three weeks we have a new junior frontend developer who now does all of our prototyping and initial frontend builds with the expected level of incredible Vuurr quality.

Call Tracking with Twilio & Google Analytics using Twimlbin

Posted on 16 Jan, 2012 in Custom Development

Nearly a year ago, I was working on a new feature for an app powered by Twilio when I realized that it would be significantly easier to get started with Twilio’s TwiML if hosting an XML file could be removed from the equation. Several weeks ago, Twimlbin was born. One of the features we needed to implement quickly was the ability to track calls both as a pageview and an event in Google Analytics. After building this feature, we found it more and more useful for many other call tracking instances. With this feature and the TwiML <Redirect> secondary verb, it’s possible to use Twimlbin as a basic analytics proxy – something we find incredibly useful. Simply create a new Twimlbin with the code below or clone this bin and replace the URL with your app’s location. 

<Response>     
     <Redirect>http://www.example.com/twilio_app.php</Redirect>
</Response>

Once you’ve setup the Twimlbin, simply paste in your Google Analytics ID and you’re ready to go. You can even watch calls in realtime with the new Google Realtime Analytics feature.