Google+ wants to make you “feel like you’re connected to a group of people, like you’re part of something”. That “something” wants to be much more narrow and personal than the “Friends” list from Facebook.

What’s your opinion? Will Google+ be a threat to Facebook?

Facebook matches advertisers to users based on users’ interests, activities, favorites, their job titles, as well as the names of the groups they belong to and the pages they are fans of. That’s a lot of information, and Facebook is still a place where more often than not people are willing to share an unbelievable wealth of personal stuff with their Friends and the Facebook Corporation. From a marketer’s perspective, Facebook can offer profound insights into the personalities and circumstances of one’s target audience. As a gathering place on the Internet, Facebook’s communities and the community demographics developed therein can give marketers surgical precision as they find an arena for their ads.

To begin his talk at SES Toronto, Marty Weintraub identified three classes of Facebook targeting tactics that every Facebook marketer ought to have at their disposal. Literal, competitive and inferred targeting should all inform a Facebook ad strategy. Let’s take a look at these three and summarize Weintraub’s discussion of them in more detail:

Literal Targeting:

These are the most obvious connections a marketer can make. Selling lacrosse sticks to people who like “playing lacrosse” on Facebook would be an obvious starting point. Literal targeting aims to match ads that are semantically related to the interests of users on Facebook. Often a keyword appears both in the interests listed by users and in the ad itself. Literal targeting allows marketers a way into Facebook that is parallel to SEM efforts on search engines. The downside is that these clear relationships sometimes don’t exist and that they unlock only a fraction of community demographics’ potential. As a marketer, Facebook allows you to go deeper into the lives your audience than ever before. The question according to Mr. Weintraub is “how deep are you willing to go?”

Competitive Targeting:

Competitive targeting focuses on both the positive and negative Facebook presence of a brand’s competitors on Facebook. A competing brand’s fans on Facebook might be an effective place to market your superior goods. Explain the added value of your product in your ad, offer a deal, try to win people over to your side. Fans of brands that are vulnerable, either because of an inferior product, negative press coverage, a recall of some sort, whatever the vulnerability may be, present fertile ground for converts. Essentially, marketers should try to find ways to leverage competitor investments in organizing their followers on Facebook both for their own Facebook presence and against the competitors themselves.

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No official word yet from Google

A couple weeks ago, Google’s Matt Cutts talked about a new iteration of Google’s Panda update, which he said was already approved and would be hitting soon. The update has been commonly referred to throughout the search industry as “Panda 2.2″.

This version is expected to more heavily address the issue of scraped content, an issue that continues to plague the web and Google’s search results (the scraped content often ranks higher than the original) even post-Panda. Cutts is quoted as saying in a liveblog of an SMX Advanced session, “A guy on my team [is] working on that issue. A change has been approved that should help with that issue. We’re continuing to iterate on Panda. The algorithm change originated in search quality, not the web spam team.”

Google has not made any announcements or references indicating that the update has gone live yet, but webmasters are thinking it might have been released. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread, where there is a mix of webmasters claiming they have suffered from the alleged update and some that have recovered. One said, “I’ve recovered as of 36 hours ago. Day1 of recovery, traffic doubled, adsense tripled Day2 of recovered, 4 hours in, traffic has doubled again, back to my best levels of 18 months ago.”

Cutts said he didn’t know when Panda would be launched internationally (in other languages), and that Google has made no manual exceptions with the update, meaning all sites have been affected solely by algorithmic tweaks – none by hand. ”

It’s important to note that Google makes algorithmic adjustments every day, and sometimes even more than once a day. Obviously not all updates get the attention the Panda update has received, but you never know when some adjustment can impact your site’s rankings for better or for worse.

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Strong creative can be a huge competitive advantage in the world of paid search. When you can pay less to get more, you’re doing something right.

The compounding factors of improved CTR, increased quality score, and reduced CPC can make a tremendous impact on performance. Ad copy testing lies at the heart of seizing this competitive advantage.

With an endless number of attributes to test, it can be a little daunting to pick a starting point. Looking for a positive impact? Here are five ad copy attributes you can test.

1. Price Points & Percentage Off

If you’re a retailer, this is must. You’re missing out big if you aren’t testing into specific price points and percent off offers.

Important: don’t make assumptions here. Test out multiple price points and percentages off to find out what will resonate with consumers. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations of why not to assume anything when it comes to price points:

PPC Price Points

A 76.5 percent CTR lift on the higher price point. We can make assumptions as to why the higher of the two price points experienced the higher CTR. Maybe the “or Less” factored in, or maybe “$39” just sounded too good to be true. Hard to say. This is precisely why we test.

2. Google Sitelinks

By now you have hopefully enjoyed the benefits of running Google Sitelinks in your ads. The presence of ad sitelinks can lift CTR by more than 30 percent.

Surprisingly, many advertisers still haven’t added these to their campaigns. Maybe they’ve tested it and found that their ads perform better without sitelinks, but this is doubtful. I haven’t seen an instance where an ad’s CTR decreased as a result of having sitelinks present.

Don’t let your sitelinks get stale. Remember to rotate in new pages to test, and test variations of the ad copy. Keep refining.

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Social media ROI has remained elusive for numerous marketers despite their best efforts to develop a calculation that will prove the business value of the allotted social media resources.

Through a new feature in Google Analytics, some customization to your Google Analytics tracking, and diligent work on the part of your social media team, the ROI of your social media efforts can be discovered using Google Analytics. To get to the point where you can calculate social media ROI, there are four steps that need to be taken.

Step 1: Implement Proper Social Media Tracking

Ensure that you’ll have the ability to segment revenue that’s generated through social sources by your internal direct efforts and revenue that resulted through external social means. In other words, revenue that’s generated as a result of links your team placed on social sites and revenue generated through links placed by people outside your company.

In order to measure your direct impact, you need to ensure you’re always using campaign tracking on any links you put out on social media sites that point back to one of your sites. It’s a fairly easy process, but one that can be a bit tedious to manage at the outset. Once you’re in the habit of always adding campaign tracking, it will become second nature and the results will be well worth the effort.

Google offers a simple URL builder tool to help create campaign tracking strings, but you should either build your own tool or creating one in Excel that allows you to manage the names that are used for each parameter. This is very important because you don’t want to cause yourself reporting headaches by using different names for parameters that should be the same.

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It’s been our experience that asking for a testimonial can be a long and arduous process. Sometimes it seems easier to just ask a friend to repeat after you, or invent a statement that touches on all your key selling features.

The value of a real testimonial can’t be stressed enough in our opinion.

Sometimes getting one is really difficult. I’ve been asked to write testimonials for people I’ve worked with and it’s hard! Instead, we’ve found writing down a client’s comments after a positive discussion and then sending it to them asking for their approval to use their statements to be the most effective.

When someone else basically writes it for me after speaking with me, it’s easy to just reply “approved!” It is in my own words, and expresses what I wanted to say as part of a conversation rather then having fight writers block.

In terms of fake or testimonials written from friends, we always suggest avoiding them. Sometimes potential clients will want to speak to the person who provided such a rave review. If you have a good relationship with your clients, they’re often willing to network with others who are also interested in using your services.

What could be a better sales tool than that?

In link building, getting shot down is just part of the game. We know that going in, but we also try to find ways to hedge our bets. Hence, mass emailing and link exchange spam. The broader the net you cast, the better your chances of catching something, right?

That kind of theory does help explain the lack of personalized emails. Rejection is one thing, but the painstaking nature of sending link requests one at a time and getting nowhere is beyond frustrating.

We can deal with getting called names, like “dirty spammer” or having insults hurled at our sites, our profession and/or our mothers. We can even laugh at it and hang some of the best ones up on our office walls.

But silence is painful. When it seems like all of our emails are just being sent into a response-less void, it’s actually more disheartening than being told to “die a miserable spam-filled death.”

High rejection levels and unanswered emails are two of the biggest deterrents for many people who’ve attempted and abandoned this tactic. But sending personalized, well-constructed, compelling link requests can be a highly useful method of building links. That is, if you nail the finer points.

Creating a successful link request is about more than just using someone’s name because you found it on the “About” page. And if “nos” and silence are all you’re getting back, then most likely, it’s not them, it’s you. Here are only a few reasons why even personalized link requests may be declined.

It Never Got Opened

In all likelihood your email got dismissed without ever being opened. With a poor subject line or an email address that triggered a spam filter, your message may never have passed in front of human eyes.

What you put into your subject line matters. A lot.

There are some really dumb red-flag words you can use (e.g., “link exchange”) but it’s possible it’s also just too generic, or vague. Even seemingly innocuous attempts like “Hey There” or a smiley emoticon are kind of sketchy.

Some websites tell you what to put in a subject line so they will know you’re human. But if it’s not that obvious, try responding directly to the title of a specific page, topic, or article. Of course that’s impossible if you’re just sending a mass email from an automated program. And that’s really just comedy for the rest of us anyway, so bully for you.

A Total Lack of Relevance

The biggest reason any link request will be turned down is that it’s just not appealing to your target. Suppose the email does get opened, and the recipient even decides to visit the site in question, what exactly are they going to find? Will they discover that it is, as you claim, “relevant” to their page? Is it really something of interest, value and relevance? If it isn’t, then you pretty much wasted your time and theirs. Drawing cogent connections is probably the most important part of sending a personalized link request.

Obviously the best matches are directly relevant to your site’s overall topic. But most of the time you’ll have to do a little digging and angling to make a convincing correlation.

The best bet is to provide information or resources that support their existing content. Even suggesting new content that will bring value to their readers is a solid approach.

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Developing linkable content for a site has always been a great way to develop links. Instead of the typical written content I’m talking about anything online that people can link to – tools, widgets, cartoons, surveys, statistics, charts, interactive games, etc.The trick is finding the content that will attract links after you’ve actively promoted it. Let’s explore methods of coming up with a strategy for your site, or client.

Proven Techniques

The simplest way to ensure your content will attract links is to find something already accomplishing the task. Spend time researching sites in your industry and related businesses. When examining their backlinks, make a note of what type of content is getting the good links. Then do something similar – with your own spin.

You’ll notice in most cases the content with great backlinks wasn’t created for the purpose of link development.

Here’s a tip. If the content page has a higher PR (PageRank) than the homepage you’ve probably found a truly remarkable strategy. Regular readers know I rarely mention that little green bar so many are addicted too. Yet, in this instance, it can help you identity a successful strategy.

Be the First

Always be on the lookout for new trends or problems facing your industry. If you’re the first to create something around this you’re more likely to get the links. This could be an app, online tool, widget, research, or even a cartoon poking fun of the new trend.

If you’re a small company, don’t be overwhelmed by the lack of resources. Keep in mind there are a wealth of talented independent contractors who can help you. This could range from a talented programmer to a creative cartoonist. Keep your options open.

Modernize an Online Tool

Is there an old online tools that is useful yet hasn’t been updated with a modern feel in five or 10 years? Would it make a great smartphone app? This is your chance to update and improve it at the same time.

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Last week, Google bought PostRank, a social analytics service that tracks and measures social posts. With this acquisition, Google has gained a resource to better understand the social web, and that resource can be applied to great impact in several of Google’s key social arenas.

What Is (or Was) PostRank?

PostRank, in their own words, “is the largest aggregator of social engagement data in the industry.” The service allowed users to get real-time data on trending topics, high-volume conversations around the web, and their own posts. The company was established in 2007 under the name “AideRSS.” They re-branded as PostRank in October of 2008 in preparation for more socially oriented features. In July of 2009, the company released a service to track social trends (i.e. for datamining). Over the next year they expanded into brand management, blogging services, trend analysis, and consulting services.

The company was acquired by Google earlier this month, but beyond that no details have been released regarding the transaction. A Google representative gave a fairly typical statement to TechCrunch about the company’s excitement to be working with the PostRank team, stating that PostRank has “developed an innovative approach to measuring web engagement, and we think they can help us improve our products for our users and advertisers.” Which is almost exactly the same as what they said about buying Slide.

While we don’t know exactly what the PostRank team will be doing, it is known that they’re moving from their Waterloo, Ontario home to Mountain View, California, and statements from both Google and PostRank indicate that the team’s focus will continue to be on social tracking and analytics. As was the case with Slide, SayNow and Fflick acquisitions Google is most likely buying the talent of the development team, rather than the product.

What Google’s Acquisition Means

It’s fairly common knowledge that Google is going more social. Since Google’s first foray into the social scene (aka, the disaster that was Buzz), the company has been attempting, with mixed success, to implement social features. However, if one thing is certain, it’s that Google is committed to changing its poor position when it comes to the social web. They even went so far as tying the bonuses of all Googlers to the company’s success in social.

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Search marketers are lucky. Really, we are. We get to work in a medium where we have access to real-time data and can adjust our strategies and execution nearly as quickly.

No matter how much we may gripe about the engines’ “black box” algorithms, we can’t argue with performance and a lot of deep data that we can get our hands on.

For some, that might be a curse. Like a paella-laden Estelle Costanza might say, “what are we supposed to do with all this data?”

Use it. And keep using it. Then find more data, and use that too.

Test, implement, analyze.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

1. Expand Your Keyword Lists

Building out and refining your keyword lists is a good example. Everyone knows the value of the long tail in helping lower CPCs.  And yet we all know the tendency to throw everything in there and come up with a list that’s unwieldy and impossible to manage.

When it comes to finding the right keywords for your account, there are lots of tools available, whether free options from Google, a third-party system, or an agency’s own proprietary tool. But there’s a lot of value in pouring through search query reports to find long tail and negative recommendations.

By matching the query to the credited keyword and then analyzing the return on that query, you can identify where to find lower CPCs or reduce waste by adding negatives for non-converters.

A more refined approach is to leverage the conversion rate, cost and revenue to come up with a projected contribution margin for typed keywords.  Then match those with what’s currently in your account. Missing keywords with high CMs go into your long tail; negative CMs go into your negatives.

For example, if you have a keyword “Acme brown widgets” and find that Google is matching up the query “extra large Acme brown widgets” to it, look at the performance of that keyword for each time it’s matched to that query.  Subtract cost from revenue to find the contribution margin (or divide if you prefer to organize by ROAS) telling you how profitable that query is.

If it’s high, add the longer tail “extra large Acme brown widgets” to your keyword lists and the ensuing lower CPCs will bring even greater margin. If it’s lower, “extra large” may be a good negative keyword for this campaign.

Just be sure to run a similar report after these new keywords have garnered traffic and refine as necessary.

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