What MTV’s Jersey Shore can teach us about Internet Marketing

It’s not all fun and games at the Seaside house. The cast of brazen characters on the Jersey Shore are a wild bunch of misfits that can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Whether it be toxic affairs, overly dramatic rivalries, or local xenophobia; this young crew’s frivolous management of relationships and their own personal well-being opens a window for the outsider to build a guide on how-to not ruin marketing campaigns. If you’re not sure how the two match up, keep reading…

MTV's Jersey Shore Snookie

Snookie- The lovable, sassy, self-proclaimed guidette loves nothing more than tanning herself and making out with boys, but she also has a bit of a Napoleon complex. Being slight of stature but unafraid of a fight, she’s been punched more times than Kool-Aid. For some reason, the poor girl isn’t aware enough to know when trouble is brewing.

Learn from Snookie- It’s important to have a certain amount of real self-realization when considering online marketing channels. In SEM there are plenty of instances where you’ll simply be too outmatched to engage in a battle. The competitive landscape in both PPC and SEO and maybe such an uphill climb for newcomer businesses that lower barriers of entry can be found elsewhere. This wouldn’t mean abandoning either tactic, but simply revising it so that you are leveling the playing field. You may consider going strictly long-tail if your keyword sets are deep enough and using the same optimization practice to wage war against lesser opponents. This would be the equivalent of Snookie picking a fight with midgets and kindergartners rather than strung out hookers and roided out monkeys.

MTV's Jersey Shore Pauly D

Pauly D- The ladies man known most commonly for his signature blowout haircut. Pauly had a pretty successful time meeting girls at the bar for later conquest. His total operation is centered on meeting easy women. The Ed Hardy gear, the gym regiment, the haircut, it’s all focused on one goal.

Learn from Pauly- What Pauly might not realize is that his product is too geo focused to ever have success out of his home market. In order to scale nationally he would need to substantially overhaul his approach. It’s important to realize that different markets will not only react differently to marketing cues and product benefits. This can differ in regions as tight as neighboring cities. Thankfully geo-locatable advertising mediums online give us the ability to isolate and exploit. Marketers fall in love with national level A/B testing, which is imperative, and forget about regional testing. A/B testing can and should be separated at a regional level and independent markets should dictate their own testing schedule. Think about the local influence of broadcast news and how coverage may differ from Los Angeles to Boston.

MTV's Jersey Shore Mike 'The Situation'

Mike ‘The Situation’- Shortly after meeting Mike, you’ll be bound to know why he is the best thing to hit the Jersey Shore since spaghetti Bolognese. His callous desire to be the center of attention at all given times wears on everyone’s nerve. You can only take so much of ‘The Situation’ before you’re thoroughly sick of him.

Learn from The Situation- It’s plain and simple; there IS a sweet spot for ad frequency. Over serving ads, saturating channels, and riding a single set of creative for too long will not only erode short term returns, but erode brand equity you’ve built over time. Moderation is the key to all sorts of nice things: growing old, not getting too drunk, staying out of jail, and keeping your advertising fresher longer if you don’t have the luxury of an in-house creative team.

MTV's Jersey Shores Ronnie

Ronnie- The bear-like young man that tears up dance-floors and opponents faces like a ravenous…bear. Though he exhibits a tender and caring side, Ronnie’s testosterone get’s the best of him at times and he can’t control getting himself in dangerous situations. He naturally spends some time in jail.

Learn from Ronnie- Karma is a b**** sometimes. Maybe you’re not the only party at fault, but if you are getting pulled into affiliate programs that don’t give you any active voice in the management of your brand identity, then you could have your hands full. I’ve personally negotiated CPA based deals with networks only to find out that publishers were allowed to run wild with unapproved creative. Imagine the punch in the face I received when I checked my voicemail and had messages of people calling me a racist. You think that management fee and flat rate agency relationships are a gamble? Relinquishing all of your moderation authority to someone motivated by the almighty dollar could be a bet made with really unfortunate odds. Take that chance and you may get burned.

Think I’m way off? Go ahead and make a marketing parallel with J-Wow, Angelina, Sammie, or Vinny and post it below.

Starting June 15th, resellers and information sites in the U.S. will be allowed to use trademarked terms in their ad text under certain conditions. Under the old guidelines only trademark owners and advertisers with explicit approval from the trademark owner have been allowed to use trademarked terms in the headline and description lines.

Here are the new guidelines for using a trademarked term, according to Google:

Under this policy, an advertiser will be allowed to use a trademarked term in the ad text when the ad uses a trademarked term and:

• Does so in a descriptive way, using the generic dictionary definition of the term
• Leads to a reseller or aggregator of that trademarked good or service
• Leads to a seller of components, replacement parts, or compatible products for that trademarked good or service
• Leads to an informational site about that trademarked good or service

Certain cases are specifically not allowed to use trademark terms in the ad text. These cases include:

• Ads or sites that sell or facilitate the sale of counterfeit goods
• Ads or sites that primarily sell or facilitate the sale of competitive goods or services
• Ads or sites focused on criticism about the trademarked good or service
• Unclear ads or sites without substantial information

One other guideline Google mentions is that associated landing pages must sell the goods or services of the trademarked term, and in the case of informational sites they must be non-competitive.

Obviously Google is doing this to bring in even more revenue through Adwords. Being able to use trademarked terms will improve advertiser click-through-rates, and more clicks mean more money for Google. For advertisers it just means we will be able to create more specific and relevant text ads, thus improving quality. I still find the guidelines to be a little grey, especially for informational sites which are “focused on criticism,” so as long as your aren’t “focused” on it I guess you are good to go. Either way I am certain Google will be getting many complaints from trademark owners about sites trying to game the trademark guidelines. Now it’s time to find an account to take advantage of this new policy.

I thought I would never be writing a blog post about PPC keyword research with the amount of posts that I have come across regarding this topic. Usually it is something that I already implement like Google’s Keyword Tool, Search Based Keyword Tool, Trends, Insights, Analytics, Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and so on. As you can see there are many ways to do keyword research, and from all different angles. Today I am going to share one of my favorite ways to do both keyword and negative keyword research.

As you may all know within the Google Adwords platform you have the capability for the keyword tool to crawl website content, which will then spit out keywords related to the content of the page. Most people would plug-in the domain for the account they are working on which makes perfect sense, but I have found that majority of the time I get better results using the “descriptive words or phrases” feature.

With that being said I have discovered a great way to make the website content keyword generator to work in your favor.  With any client you are usually going to be able to pick one or two of the most general keywords for that client.  For this example I am going to choose the keyword “auto insurance.”   After you choose a general keyword you will take that word and do a search for it on ask.com.  I know, who would have ever thought ask.com would come into play during the keyword research process.   The thing is when you do a search on Ask, it also gives you a list of related search terms on the right hand side, and no this is not where you will find your keyword gems.  Once you do a search on that keyword you will take the URL of the search result, which in this case was http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=2417&o=0&l=dir&q=auto+insurance, and paste it into the Adwords Keyword Tool.  Hit generate and just like that you have tons of additional keywords, as well as discovering even more potential negative keywords. You will be surprised at the number of keywords and its variations that it will generate. This tactic also works using an online thesaurus, yes even for a term like “auto insurance,” give it a try and you will see what I am talking about.

Do you need help with your keyword research. Check out our full list of pay per click management services.

The Problems with the current Pay Per Click Management Industry.

The PPC management companies need to start making a change. There is very little relation between amount of spend on a campaign and amount of work needed to run the most efficient and ROI producing search campaign. If this is widely known then why on earth are all of the companies charging this way? Paid search (PPC) adopted the business model from the traditional Ad Agency. Why would we adopt the business model that started 70 years ago? It just makes no sense at all.

The eVisibility difference -

eVisibility has made a bold step to start the migration of how companies pay for PPC Campaign Management. We are now offering flat rate, hourly pricing on all campaigns. Why is this better?

The answer is below:

eVisibility is exposing the Paid Search Industry’s dirty little secret:

Companies who are paid a percentage of ad spend are only motivated to spend as much as possible. They are only motivated to optimize your PPC campaign to the extent that you still spend as much as possible. They let thousands of keywords run and spend millions of dollars with absolutely zero ROI. These poor performing keywords are offset by the 10%-20% of keywords that actually turn a hefty profit. If the compensation structure is flawed, then the whole relationship is flawed. The ideal structure is an agency that is compensated by the hours that they dedicate to your PPC Campaign Management. Their ONE GOAL should be achieving the VERY BEST ROI possible based on your unique business needs. Too many times we have seen clients who came from other Pay Per Click Management Agencies who charge a 15% management fee on a $100K budget, who are throwing $50+K down the drain every month because it would have meant a huge pay cut for the old agency to trim the fat. If you pay a percentage of spend, you are literally paying someone to lie to you.

If we tell you that you can spend more, we are not doing so to get paid more. If we cut your spend in half and provide the same amount of business to you, then we still get paid the same level.

There are two types of advertiser who would benefit from this pricing model:

Large Budget Accounts ($20,000+) - Just because you have a large budget does not necessarily mean that your campaign is going to take longer to manage Why would you have to pay us more every time you wanted to increase your budget? We feel that maintaining a large campaign should simply be broken down into how many hours we work. You will get exactly what you pay for.

Small Budget Accounts – Being veterans in the search marketing industry, we can tell you that you get what you pay for. If you have a $2,000 a month budget and you are paying an agency 15% of your budget ($300), you are going to get 2-3 hours a month dedicated to your account. With the traditional percentage based model, you will not be treated as an equal to a large account. Take the cost of management versus spend out of the equation. I have seen $2,000 campaigns produce $3000 in revenue and I have seen them produce $50,000 in revenue for a business each month. Ask yourself what the opportunity cost of an improperly managed campaign. Managing your Paid search campaign should not be any different from a pricing standpoint in an SEO campaign.

Unique value in eVisibility Hourly Priced Model:

• Know that when we suggest you spend more, it’s not for our benefit
• Know that we will only spend dollars that make you money, not us
• We will shave all the fat from your account instantly, instead of keeping it there to get paid.
• Rest easy knowing that everything that can be done is being done despite budget size.

At eVisibility we are passionate about results. We see a large hole in logic of the majority of Paid Search Agencies. We would rather provide a benefit to both the advertiser and our business. In paid search the money doesn’t have to be in the medicine, it can be in the cure.

A couple months, ago we decided to implement A/B ad testing for one of our clients for their top four performing ad groups. We would have 2 different ad copies per ad group that were optimized based on conversions. Depending on which of those text ads wasn’t converting in comparison to the other, the lower of the two was replaced. The client would send us new text ads, and sometimes landing pages, to test every two weeks. This would eventually become the flaw of the “top performing” ad groups.

A good two months has gone by since we implemented ad testing. As we expected, the testing hurt their quality score as average cost per click and average position both took a hit. Below is the result of one of the four ad groups that we had implemented for ad testing. The results were quite identical for the other three ad groups.

As you can see from above, at the start of the ad testing implementation, average CPC was at $2.01 and average position was at 7.2. When the first rounds of changes were made, average CPC jumped to $2.03 and Avg. position went to 7.3. As changes were being made to text ads and landing pages every two weeks, you can see that the average CPC and average position were steadily increasing every week. During the last week of text ad testing, average CPC hit a high of $2.37 with an average position of 8.3.

Since we have always been a strong believer that it takes at least two weeks to firmly establish a quality score in Google, these types of results only further solidified those beliefs. Once the client saw the evidence of our analysis, we were able to suggest that text ad and landing page changes be done once a month; this way we can establish a better quality score, lower average CPC, and improve ad positioning. This month I hope to stop the bleeding and get back to the good old days.

Recently Google has increased their already robust Change History Reporting. Previously, the feature let you look back a maximum of 3 months to see what changes had been done and by whom. Now the feature shows changes up to 2 years back, starting January 1, 2006.

What does this mean to advertisers?

1. You can retrace your steps and compare analytical data with the changes you have made in order to determine which were good and bad decisions.
2. If you have an agency, you can easily check what they have been doing over the past 2 years.

Here’s how:

1. Go to the campaign management tab
2. Click on the tools sub tab and find the “my change history” link
3. Select the desired date range to start with
4. Select how far back you would like to look
5. Select which types of changes you would like to view
6. View all the changes that have been made

There are many options to play with here. You can filter the changes to see more specific changes:

1. The changes made by certain people
2. Changes made to a certain area of your account

It’s a great way to learn about your past and keep whoever is handling your account honest.