Rehashing 2015: A #MarketingNerds Christmas Spectacular by @AkiLiboon | Dramel Notes

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In this week’s episode of the Marketing Nerds podcast, Executive Editor Kelsey Jones is joined by SEJ Founder Loren Baker and Chief Social Media Strategist Brent Csutoras. They talked about the happenings in 2015 that made a huge impact in the digital marketing world, as well as what marketers should think about in 2016.

Here are a few of transcribed excerpts from their discussion, but make sure to listen to the podcast to hear everything:

Mobilegeddon and its Effect on Paid Search

Even though Google didn’t roll out what was probably expected to be the equivalent of the Florida update for mobile, or a Panda or Penguin for mobile, it did get everyone thinking. Around that same time, we started seeing pretty much across-the-board mobile searching outweighing desktop searches.

It was great timing there. It was also interesting, as around the same time they were doing a big push for Google Now adoption. I think, if anything, it got web masters, SEOs, and marketers together—whether it be in a crisis scenario or not—to put mobile on the forefront. Sometimes you really need that.

It got everyone huddled up and saying, “Hey, let’s put together a plan because Google just slapped us.”

Same thing with Mobilegeddon. It’s like, “Hey, let’s actually talk to the IT team, let’s figure out what our mobile experience is like.” Or, “Hey, who’s used the terrible mobile app we’re sending people to when they try to access this on their smartphone?”

One of the sad things about this particular release was the fact that the only people who would really notice this update are the people who wouldn’t be affected by it; and all the people who were affected by it wouldn’t notice.

It’s all the mom and pop shops, it’s all the little dojos and martial arts schools, the yoga and exercise studios, and all these little shops around town that are already stressing because with “local” you’re already doing stuff based on location. You have stuff where people are on the edge of a zip code and can’t be included in what’s considered six blocks away because they’re in the wrong zip code.

You already have businesses that are challenged because their rankings in local are based on distance first. Now you have an update that potentially keeps them from being included in mobile search at all, and they have no real path to understanding that.

How Ad Blockers can Impact Your Business’ Bottom Line

We’re seeing ad blockers become a much more standardized thing.

It’s definitely picked up a lot and you’ve seen concern, but I don’t think ad blockers are the real cause for the concern. I think that there’s been a drop in value in display ads for a long time and ad blockers are a great excuse for the decrease in demand and the blinders display ads have created in our industry.

It’s a great thing for a fortune company to say, “Well, it’s not that people don’t like display ads, it’s that people are blocking them.” I challenge whether it’s ad blockers or just a changing marketplace for advertising and having to evolve more than anything else.

Last year at SEJ we put forth an initiative to lower our dependency upon banner ads or ads that are served through the exchange.

While it was done to increase revenue rather than to prepare for ad blocker-geddon, as all the ad blocker buzz came out I started to realize, “Hey, we have really lowered our dependency upon banner ads and lower CPMs in exchange-based CPMs.” We were making it harder for people doing problematic advertising to sneak stuff in there.

It’s like ad blockers really woke people up. Once there’s an ability to have an ad blocker on your iPhone by default, it woke people up on two sides. One, it scares publishers to death, especially for the banner advertising. People always tell you to Google-proof your strategy, but you should banner-proof your strategy as well.

Two, around the same time that the ad blockers rolled out, Apple News rolled out Facebook featured articles, or News Now, and then Google App’s project rolled out. The ad blockers are as scary to the delivery devices of this content as it is to the publishers. But at the same time, it opens up a new opportunity.

With Google App, Google can basically work with publishers to bypass the whole on-site browser experience to deliver the content directly to the end-user. One AdSense ad could be worth a lot more than having five or six ads on your site.

From an SEO perspective, it’s going to be tough. Publishers are geared up to do it because they really want to get more reads and they see it as being a real opportunity, but then it’s also an SEO attribution opportunity because people are still going to be finding that content through search.

There are a couple of things that are important to look at with this topic: There’s been a huge increase in vulnerabilities. There’s been a concern from people about ads. There was the whole flash concept of that being vulnerable and so there is the desire from Google’s perspective and Facebook’s perspective to eliminate a lot of these risks.

I think the more we look at this idea that if you control all eyeballs then you control all ad dollars, if you took 60 billion that Google made last year, if you look at the almost $500-billion advertising budget online, Google’s biggest opportunity to increase their revenue is not to increase ads, it’s to take over the entire channel.

Once you’ve digested data where you have made it fast with no distractions and nothing popping up, the competition is not going to be able to keep you in their sight. You’re going to be like, “I don’t want to go through Google Search and find these pages and have them load all slow when I can go to Google’s App program and see everything fast.”

Google, Facebook, and Apple as Publishers

I think what they’re doing is re-structuring with this program that is no longer all-inclusive. It’s not like everybody is in Google App. You have to sign up to be a part of it.

Search engines are one of the last places where your site’s included without a Terms of Service. You’re not signing some Terms of Service to include your site in Google, but when you sign up to Facebook you’re giving away the rights to that. When you sign up to these programs, you give away a lot of your rights to them.

I think you’ll see that all these future programs will have a much easier way to exclude people without having to call it exclusion.

Investigating Other Social Media Platforms and Their Benefits

When Facebook acquired Instagram everyone loved that there was no advertising on Instagram. Now, anyone can buy it anywhere.

There’s Facebook advertising and their partners’ advertising (which is basically device advertising through apps), and now Instagram as well. Facebook is slowly becoming an AdWords where you can contextually advertise on third-party sites, too. What’s next?

The second that Instagram adds the ability to link in the description, SEOs are going to be all over that. What I care the most about is people actually clicking on links because my job as a marketer is to bring targeted traffic back to the website (or back to wherever). I don’t care where it comes from as long it’s highly targeted and people take action on the site. That helps to give you the rankings.

What do Publishers Need to do in 2016?

There is a ton of augmented reality coming. There is Google saying, more than a year ago, that they anticipate in five years you won’t even be on the web.

Desktop search is going down; desktops sales, in general, are going down. You start looking at all of this stuff combined—you talk about the Amazon Echo, you look at this kind of Siri technology, and Cortana— and it starts to get about authority signals on cloud data versus authority on a brand or on a website.

If everything leads us in this direction, what do publishers need to do in 2016 to make sure they’re carrying their authority onto the next platform? I think that’s the big thing people really should be thinking about.

People don’t just digest content in one way, they digest it multiple ways and they share multiple ways.

Podcasting, for example, we’re recording one right now. It’s going to be transcribed, people are going to listen to it in their car, people are going to listen to it in the gym, people will listen to it wherever. Maybe one day there’s going to be some video of this. Can the content that you produce be put into a virtual reality setting? Like, there’s someone sitting there at the table with the three of us having or listening to this discussion.

It’s really just thinking about what you produce being more than what people can solely read, but not forgetting about the basics.

The basics are that Google will still read an article and index it and serve it to 99% of the people out there. But if we know that SEJ is the source of this broadcast and this broadcast is listened to “out there” and there are more people listening and sharing and going to it, and there’s some kind of ownership which links everything back to the source—then that should benefit the brand in the long run.

At the end of the day, how does all the data and discussion and everything that’s being spread out there attributed correctly back to the source? At the end of the day, it’s traffic generation and getting your brand out there in front of the people.

What Marketers Should be Thinking About for 2016

Mobile User Experience

First of all, make sure stuff’s cleaned up. Page feed is getting more and more important, especially in the mobile user experience. If people can’t read your content, Google is not going to serve the content—it’s that simple.

On top of that, really start thinking about what you do from an SEO perspective as being pure digital marketing. I really do believe—and from most of the signals I’ve seen—that when you bring the right people to your site, they’re going to share your content socially. They’re going to get it in front of more people; they’re maybe going to link to it if they use some archaic system like blogging or owning a website; and maybe they’re going to just spend more time on it, whatever it is.

I see all of those signals being much more important going into next year, as a whole, but really make sure that you clean stuff up, too. I could see Google land a smack-down on slow sites, both in mobile and also in desktop, especially as user behavior changes.

Goal-Oriented Social Media Campaigns

From a social side, I think people need to focus more on promoting and campaigning for the right reasons, in the right communities, and with the right messaging.

If you look at any company out there today that does advertisement in a magazine or a commercial, at no point do they decide, in a silo, that they’re just going to create whatever they want—they’re just going to throw the ad in a random five or six magazines; they don’t really care about the demographic; they don’t really care what the messaging is; they’re just going to utilize this magazine as a visibility metric for their advertisement. It just doesn’t work that way.

Repurposing Content

Video will continue to be important, live streaming—like Blab or Periscope or Meercat—will continue to be important.

It comes down to segmenting your data or your content and repurposing it. How can you turn a webinar into a podcast? How could you turn a long-form article into a video tutorial? Things like that.

Making your content stretch further will allow you to write really good content that you can repurpose versus focusing on quantity in just getting stuff out there.

Smart Social and Search Apps

Google is getting smarter and smarter and it’s fascinating to me the stuff it recommends to me.

I’ll research a Christmas present, the next day it will say, “Hey, do you still want to continue researching gym shorts? They’re on sale right now here,” and it just amazes me. That type of predictive search like, “You searched this a few days ago, would you be interested?” I think that that’s going to be part of the apps we use, especially those in social and search.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is huge. Artificial intelligence is improving so ridiculously fast that I think in the next two, three years you’re going to start seeing a huge push of AI coming to a lot of these apps and tools.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Loren Baker, Brent Csutoras, and Kelsey Jones:

• Download and listen to the full episode at the bottom of this post
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Sign up on IFTTT to receive an email whenever the Marketing Nerds podcast RSS feed has a new episode
• Listen on Stitcher

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock.com

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Robert ‘RSnake’ Hansen Talks Website Security on #MarketingNerds Podcast by @brentcsutoras | Dramel Notes

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In this week’s episode of the Marketing Nerds podcast, we are joined by Robert ‘RSnake’ Hansen, who is VP of WhiteHat Security Labs, well-respected DefCon speaker, world renown hacker, writer of Slowloris, and creator of Ha.ckers.org.

In our discussion, we talk about a number of really important topics, such as what webmasters need to focus on when it comes to website security, hiring a forensic team to evaluate your site, HTTPs and whether it helps, whether WordPress is a secure platform, should we really be worried about NSA, Facebook, and other companies tracking our data, finding Hillary Clinton’s email servers, and China’s new social engineer hack that is pretty damn scary.

This is definitely a Marketing Nerds Podcast you don’t want to miss.

Here are a few of transcribed excerpts from our discussion, but make sure to listen to the Podcast to hear everything:

What Companies Should be Considering to Stay Secure Online Today

Let’s take a retailer as an example as opposed to a bank or something. I think retailers have an interesting problem because they generally like to have user-generated content on their site. Things like feedback, or somebody asking questions, or send a friend functionality, or shopping lists, or whatever, all that stuff is user-generated content. Maybe not in a way most people think of it, but it doesn’t matter. If I’m storing something in a database that’s being reflected back at some point, that is definitely user-generated content.

I think if you’re going to say there’s one massive problem, it’s people just generally don’t do good sanitation of inputs and they don’t do good sanitation of output. The problem with that is they intermingle it with things that are actually sensitive. It’s not particularly sensitive what my shopping list or my wedding list, that kind of stuff. That’s not particularly interesting.

What is interesting is if I somehow find a way to escape out of a query and make a call to your database and pull out your user name and password, that, on the other hand, is very interesting.

Because all this stuff is intermingled and it’s all in one big database, different table but one big database, and using one database user with all the same permissions as if it was an admin, that simple design choice makes it incredibly easy to attack.

Similarly, if I’m allowed to write content and it gets saved to the actual HMTL of a page or gets reflected out as HTML, or as an admin, if from the internet I can log into my site and physically change the layout of the page or whatever, which is a common feature in content management systems, that is a pretty dangerous design choice because if there’s ever any vulnerability in the CMS, or if there’s ever any vulnerability in the user of the CMS, suddenly the attacker can modify the entire source of the website. That leads to malware, stolen usernames and passwords, and whatever.

You have to decide how bad is it if something bad happens. If this happens on some brochure where there’s nothing there, it doesn’t matter. If it happens on your main corporate website where people actually do purchase things, on the other hand, that might be the end of your company. It just depends on what we’re talking about.

Once you’ve decided that it’s something you actually want to deal with and it’s a vulnerability that’s real or whatever, generally speaking, if you know the vulnerability is there it’s very easy to fix. Super easy. There are only a couple of vulnerability classes out there that actually are tricky to solve. For the most part, it’s usually one or two lines in your code and you’re done.

If you don’t know that it’s there, there are several things you can do. One is you can hire a penetration testing firm, a company like ours that does manage security testing. Two, you can hire a bug bounty team. You basically say, “Any takers, anybody who wants to break into us we’ll pay you if you find a vulnerability.”

There are some issues with that. You have to be fairly mature to even go down that model, but the nice part is you get a robust group of random people who are all trying to hack you all at once. The third way, even if both of those fails, what you can do is you can get cyber insurance. Cyber insurance is wonderful, assuming that you’re covered, which means usually they ask you some questions like, “Do you do security auditing?” So you must have one of the first two things nailed down before you can go down that path.

I think one of the scarier things I’m seeing right now is a move to rapid redeployment where you have a website that they think it’s compromised, you just immediately replace all the code back to its known good state. It doesn’t matter that much if you get compromised then. As long as you have pretty good monitoring, you can quickly get the site back up and running.

That stops infections from taking hold in some cases where they’re not cloaking it, as a good black hat SEO would know. What it doesn’t solve is the data theft part. If you’re dealing with digital goods where it doesn’t really matter if they steal the digital good and you don’t really have any valuable information in their database, that rapid redeployment model works really well.

Does HTTPS really secure your website or just an SEO thing?

It is both. I think before you make a decision, one way or another, you should understand what the economics of it are and also understand that Google is doing this, in my opinion, primarily to prevent ad injection companies, ISPs or whatever, from injecting their own adds. Looking at the economics of it, I know that’s horrible but I’m a cynical bastard.

There is a security benefit to using it, not a huge one, but I would say the less active adversary who’s just passively listening on the wire, who happens to be a man on the middle, like at a coffee shop or something, is not going to be able to drive a whole lot of data out of a stream that uses HTTPS. They’ll be able to drive a few things, maybe they can figure out what pages you’re hitting, but they’re not really going to be able to see the content itself in most cases. That’s not the truth of all cases, but most cases.

The lazy adversary will have no idea what they’re doing. Once you get to the much more sophisticated adversaries like if, unfortunately, I were the man on the middle, I’d probably be able to see everything you’re doing, and that’s because of side channel attacks and various problems in the browser and so on. It’s not like it’s hopeless and it’s not terrible, but it’s definitely not a great security. Let’s put it that way.

The real reason that I think to do it is not just the immediate ranking boost, which I think it’s probably more like if you have a competitor who’s exactly the same rank as you, it’ll put you above them. It’s not much of a ranking factor beyond that. I think the actual value is any links you get between now and the point at which you switch over to HTTPS will have a 15% link penalty, approximately, until you get to change their link over to HTTPS because of the 301 redirect from the HTTP to the HTTPS.

Let’s say you have 200 links and 50% of them you can get them to change over to HTTPS, the other 100 you can’t, you’d have a 15% penalty. It’s like showing up to work and missing 7 and a half percent of your work week or whatever.

In my opinion, it is worth doing sooner than later for that reason alone. You don’t want to have to sacrifice any links unnecessarily.

How secure is WordPress overall?

I found a lot of vulnerabilities in WordPress over the years. I’ve also used WordPress as a core platform for a bunch of my websites and I would say gradually they’ve gotten quite a bit better. I really like the fact that they are doing more automated updates. I think that’s very clever. I think with something as simple as that plus WordFence and you’ve got a pretty decent defense, I will not go on a limb and say that the plug-ins are very good, though. The plug-ins, in general, are a gigantic crap shoot and tend to be full of vulnerabilities.

I’ve never liked the fact that their admin page is accessible in a known location. That’s just a big problem point. I don’t like how trackbacks work. I think those are very dangerous. I don’t like how the web user owns all the files. That’s very dangerous.

I don’t like how their database is set up, especially everything having the same level of access, usernames and passwords combined with text, all that stuff. There are some very strange design decisions that came from antiquity, back when WordPress was tiny that I think we’re stuck with, which modern-day, I would say, don’t do it that way. Don’t have your usernames and passwords in a PHP file and the root directory. Little things like that.

Should people turn off Trackbacks in WordPress?

Absolutely. Immediately, as a matter of fact.

Should we be wary about things like NSA spying on us or the rights we give to Facebook in their app?

I think people are right in being concerned in so much that the architecture itself allows for it. Let me give you an example. Right now, even without all of those crazy permissions, if I sent you an account, or a little light app, or something, there’s a million of those on the Android platform, I don’t actually need all those permissions to snoop on you.

I’d say for instance, the accelerometer in the phone is so sensitive that it can actually pick up voices without access to the microphone. If I wanted to, as an adversary, I could probably build a very tiny app that was able to discern most voices in the room, not as sensitive, not as well as your microphone, the microphone is designed for that purpose, but well enough that it would get me what I want.

I think it’s important for people to be aware that this is possible more than it’s necessarily being worried about the implications of any existing app or whatever in so much that if I download a bunch of apps and I have 50 on my phone, I should assume that at least one of them either has a vulnerability or is maliciously developed to do something bad to me.

That way, having that mindset just means maybe I shouldn’t bring that phone into the meeting, or maybe I should pull out the battery if my phone is capable of that, or maybe I shouldn’t have this conversation. You know what I mean?

Your Adversaries are Much More Capable Than They Used to be

Once upon a time if I wanted to find an exploit, every single web server, let’s say, that was vulnerable to some exploit, it would take me effectively the end of my life to scan the entire internet because by the time I finished scanning the internet, it would have changed so much because it took so long that I’d have to start the scan all over again. We’re talking, in some cases, months to scan even a very small chunk of the internet.

Nowadays there’s a change at Linux kernel that happened a couple of years back that makes it so I can scan much, much, much, much faster than I used to be able to. I’m no longer bound by a number of sockets that a computer can open and now I’m bound by bandwidth. Bandwidth is cheap. It’s easy to get a lot of bandwidth. Now I could scan, let’s say, the entire internet on a single port in a few minutes, handful of minutes.

What that really means is I know that sounds bad, I can basically find every vulnerable machine in a few minutes, but it’s actually worse than that because what I can do is take that data and shove it in your database, and the internet doesn’t change that much that rapidly. I can run that scan, let’s say, once a day, or once a week, or whatever.

Then let’s say a new vulnerability comes out for WordPress or whatever. I can go to my database, look for all the vulnerable things that are in that database, and then start attacking them.

I can literally compromise every single machine that’s vulnerable on the entire internet in a few minutes. Long are the days of patch managements in terms of effectiveness once that really become weaponized. We won’t have the opportunity to get in front of it. You won’t even have the time to download the patch and start installing it by the time you will be compromised.

What that really means is you need to look for other things. I think DevOps is a really interesting movement in our industry towards rapid patch management, rapid fixing, detection. There are some interesting tricks out there for doing detection of somebody who’s compromising you, that kind of thing.

Basically, the point of the presentation is that whole method of keeping something in separate directory no one will ever find me, or trying to protect myself by removing the word PHP out of my Apache HTTP response or whatever. That just doesn’t work anymore, or, at least, it doesn’t work well enough to stop an adversary like what I’m talking about.

China’s New Social Engineering Hack: The Human Credit Score

China has a new credit score the country is considering, I think it actually originated from Alibaba or something so it’s not a guarantee that this will happen. Effectively, if you and I are friends, and I’m a political dissident and China knows about that, you and your credit score would get dinged because you and I are friends on some social network. If you buy things like dishwashers and baby food, your credit score would go up. If you buy video games, your credit score would go down.

Anything that the states want you to do, you’d get a higher credit score, and that credit score actually means something. It helps you get a better passport, they actually give you money, you get better jobs. If you get a lower credit score you get ostracized by your friends, you cannot have certain types of jobs, again, you can’t travel internationally, and so on.

I think that is one of the most interesting hacks I’ve ever heard of because it’s very similar the way the Stasi used to work. You never know who’s part of the Stasi, your best friend could be, so you never really want to say anything negative because you can always be ostracized or outed by the very person who you have dinner with. This is at a mass scale and it basically shows how incredibly dangerous social networking is because now they really do have a very powerful platform for identifying this.

It would be a public score that anyone can check on anyone else’s score, which is interesting. The government hasn’t come out and said they were definitely doing this, but the idea is on the next couple of years. It’s already there, it already exists, but in the next couple of years the theory is this might become law, in which case you better start working on your credit score right now because down the road it will impact your ability to get loans, have friends, and all kinds of stuff.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Robert ‘RSnake’ Hansen and Brent Csutoras:

• Download and listen to the full episode at the bottom of this post
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Sign up on IFTTT to receive an email whenever the Marketing Nerds podcast RSS feed has a new episode
• Listen on Stitcher

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Image by Aki Libo-on
In-post Photo #2: Image by Robert Hansen. Used with permission.

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New #MarketingNerds Podcast: Can Google AdWords Customer Match Take Your PPC to the Next Level? by @AkiLiboon | Dramel Notes

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In this week’s episode of Marketing Nerds, WordStream CTO and Founder, Larry Kim, joins SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones to talk about Google AdWords’ Customer Match. Larry gave an overview of AdWords’ new feature, how businesses can use it, and why it’s better to choose niche PPC audiences over widespread ones.

Here are a few of transcribed excerpts from their discussion, but make sure to listen to the Podcast to hear their whole conversation!

What is Customer Match?

It’s a fantastic targeting option in AdWords. What’s so interesting about this is you can target individuals, like Kelsey or Larry, with ads. You need to take a step back to understand how crazy this is, in terms of being a game changer. In search advertising, PPC advertising, a search on Google, for example, Google AdWords. You’re buying keywords, but we have no idea who is actually searching behind those keywords.

We don’t know the identity of the person. Whether it’s Larry or Kelsey doing that search. Similarly, when you’re doing retargeting, which is another form of popular PPC advertising, you’re targeting people who have visited your website, but again, you don’t know whether or not it’s Kelsey or Larry. It’s some anonymous person who visited your site. What Customer Match does is it says, “Wait a minute. Your best business comes from people who you know.”

You can upload emails and IDs for specific people who you’re interested in. Because a lot of times when you’re just surfing the internet, you’ll have logged in to YouTube or logged in to Google Plus or logged into the Gmail or Google Drive. It’ll know that it’s you surfing. What it can do is then it’ll match a vendor’s ads according to the person who’s actually logged into the computer. Or the mobile phone.

That’s really interesting, because now there’s certainty over who you’re targeting. “Oh, this is Kelsey. We can give very specific ad copy.” Maybe you checked out a certain clothing but didn’t buy the thing last week. Then I can come up with a very specific ad copy that speaks to your specific state within my buying funnel. Do you see what I mean? Overall, it’s quite a game changer.

AdWords’ Customer Match vs. Facebook’s Custom Audience vs. Twitter’s Tailored Audience

The whole idea behind Customer Matching (“custom audience” for Facebook and “tailored audience” for Twitter) is basically the same concept of marketing ads to specific people. In order for this to work, the platform—either Twitter or Google or Facebook—needs to be able to match emails with users on their platforms. That’s called the match rate.

I was very curious to see how Google compared in terms of their match rate. Let’s say if you have a hundred emails randomly, how many of them will actually correspond to Facebook accounts or Google accounts or Twitter accounts?

I uploaded 357,000 emails to Google and got around a 51% percent match rate. I did the same list of emails, uploaded them to Facebook. Facebook was able to match just about 50% of them. It was essentially a tie within 1% of each other. The real loser was Twitter which, as much as I love Twitter, it’s kind of a basket case in terms of advertising. They were able to match on 10% of these people.

Obviously, if you could only pick one place to do this type of advertising, I would pick either Google or Facebook because they have such a high match rate of approximately 50% each. Google edged out Facebook, although I wouldn’t say that it was like a landslide or anything like that. It was within a too close to call kind of range.

When to Use Facebook’s Custom Audience over Google’s Customer Match

Well, they’re completely different in terms of the modality of the person seeing the ads. Google Customer Match Ad words is still targeting people searching for keywords. It’s just that you can target specific people for specific keywords.

Two things have to happen: Larry or Kelsey needs to search on Google for a certain keyword and then I’ll show them this specific ad that’s relevant to them. That’s traditional high commercial intent keywords. Where someone is specifically looking for something and just doesn’t know where to get it from.

For Facebook ads, it’s going to be your news feed ads and then think about your own Facebook news feeds. It’s going to be a little bit more casual, just FYI kind of stuff. It’s not as intense in terms of the commercial intent behind the person viewing the ads, but nevertheless it’ll still get out wide because the cost becomes so much cheaper on Facebook.

How Businesses Can Use Customer Match

The technology’s only about a month old, so we’re always learning new ways of how to use this thing. But, yes, we have a couple hundred customers using this technology and generally there are use cases that people use.

This has to do with targeting people according to where they are in the funnel. Think about your marketing innovation segmentations where you might have like,”Oh, this person took a trial.” Or, “This person read the white paper.” Or “This person just downloaded the white paper but didn’t take the next action.” Or “This person actually did the trial.”

Depending on where you are in the buying funnel and armed with that knowledge, you could segment your email list. Drive people from one stage of the funnel to the next stage of the funnel.

In terms of the campaign costs, it actually varies widely. Depending on what you’re promoting and how good the targeting is and how interesting the thing that you’re promoting is.

In both Facebook and Google ads, the cost per click is inversely proportional to the click-through rate. If something is very, very interesting to most of the people who are seeing it, then you’ll pay very, very little. If it’s very boring to people, then you’ll pay like an arm and a leg. If you nail the targeting using this Customer Match, you will definitely find lower cost per clicks than just generic targeting using keywords or remarketing.

What Works Well With Customer Match?

You should absolutely be pairing Customer Match with additional targeting options. Just because someone’s on your email list doesn’t mean that they’re a good prospect. Maybe 1% of the people on your email list are going to be the best buyers.

Facebook and Twitter offers the ability to segment, to narrow lists of emails. You can overlay additional targeting options. They fall into three categories. The first is Demographics, so that’s everything about you. Your age, your gender, your occupation, your job title, your parental status.

There’s Behaviors, so that’s what you do outside of Facebook or Twitter. You can target people who are buying complimentary products.

The third area has to do with Likes and Interests. Is he posting about babies or does he like a particular brand as well as that browsing history.

You combine the fact that A, the person was on your list to begin with and then overlay demographics, behaviors, and interests on top of that. Then you have a very, very narrow net that you’re casting here. If you spend $100, then I think you would find that it has a lot of leverage.

Underutilized AdWords Features

The two other most under utilized AdWords features, I believe, are Gmail ads and YouTube ads. YouTube ads are the clicks that play ahead of videos or even during and after videos. You can target those using Customer Match.

The interesting thing about that is people spend so many hours on YouTube a week. That’s a good place to get people in their downtime.

The same goes for Gmail. I can target emails to people based on their email. It’s like being able to send emails without having to send an email. It’s magic. I can target Gmail ads by email. I don’t have to worry about unsubscribes, I don’t have to worry about all those annoying things. I think it’s very effective stuff.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Larry Kim and Kelsey Jones:

• Download and listen to the full episode at the top of this post
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Sign up on IFTTT to receive an email whenever the Marketing Nerds podcast RSS feed has a new episode
• Listen on Stitcher

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Axsimen/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo #2: Image by Aki Libo-on

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New #MarketingNerds Podcast: When is it Worth Investing in Yourself? by @AkiLiboon | Dramel Notes

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In this week’s episode of Marketing Nerds, SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones and Senior Editor Danielle Antosz talks about when it’s time to invest in yourself, whether that means buying the best technology, upping your wardrobe or hair game, or paying to attend conferences and take classes.

Here are a few of transcribed excerpts from their discussion, but make sure to listen to the Podcast to hear everything:

Investing in Yourself and Making Your Time Better Spent

It’s really hard when you start out if you’re working normal nine to five job and then working weekends and nights for a side hustle. You have to spend the money and it’s really hard to change that mentality from a boot strapping to a more legitimate business.

Conferences are a big one. You can also invest on memberships to local groups where it’s a couple of hundred bucks a year for weekly or monthly networking event and it’s definitely worth it.

It’s hard because you’re going from boot-strapping to really deciding on what’s worth investing in. If you’re spending an extra 15-20 seconds waiting for a file to open because you’re computer is too slow, think about how much time you’re wasting over the course of the day if that was billable. Boot-strapping is no longer the way to go and you need to invest in the equipment to be a true professional.

If you’re an actual designer you should pay for the Photoshop. You should always pay for the Photoshop if you legitimately need it. If you’re just making Facebook posts, cover photos for WordPress, stuff like PicMonkey is fantastic. Stuff like that is worth it if you can create a better product.

At the end of the day it all comes down to giving you the most time to do what you want which includes work and then hopefully some fun leisure stuff. Realizing that you owe it to yourself and your business to invest in things that are going to make you better.

When is the Right Time to Outsource?

If there is a task that you consistently just dread doing and you know you put if off and you feel yourself putting it off. You know it’s not going to be that bad but you’re consistently just like, “I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later.” Those are the tasks within your business that you should consider outsourcing.

Because if your heart’s not truly in it the brain space that you’re wasting on ignoring that task and then the length of time it’s going to take you to get it done because you’re dragging your feet.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the, “I don’t want to pay someone to do that.” Those tasks that I drag on those are the ones that I choose to outsource. Someone can do it better, faster and cheaper.

Stepping up Your Game

Neil Patel wrote an article about how he has spent six figures on his wardrobe it actually generated him three times as much profit. It was a huge increase in income. The article was really controversial because people don’t like hearing that clothes make that big of a difference but they do. He just talked about that when he wore designer clothes then the way he felt about himself changed and the way people perceived him changed.

I think stepping up your game in the wardrobe department especially if you usually work from home and then you’re being asked to come into an office or present at a conference will, at least, make you feel a lot more confident and put together. And it’s high quality pieces that you can wear for years to come.

You should check out the thrift stores. You don’t necessarily need to dole out the cash money to get the same effect. If you go to a thrift store or you go to consignment shops to get a better deal in some of the designer pieces that are the black skirts, the pencil skirts for women, the nice suit for men.

It’s not about vanity. It’s about being professional. Putting yourself out there as a professional who’s confident, who knows what they’re doing and who should be trusted with someone else’s money. When you think of it that way it doesn’t seem as frivolous.

Website Mentioned in This Episode

• Fancy Hands

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Danielle Antosz and Kelsey Jones:

• Download and listen to the full episode at the top of this post
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Sign up on IFTTT to receive an email whenever the Marketing Nerds podcast RSS feed has a new episode
• Listen on Stitcher

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Kostenko Maxim/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo #2: Image by Aki Libo-on

Podcast: Download

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New #MarketingNerds Podcast: How to Come up With Content Idea for Your Blog by @AkiLiboon | Dramel Notes

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: iTunes| Android| RSS

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

In this week’s episode of Marketing Nerds, seasoned writer, Amanda DiSilvestro, joins SEJ Executive Editor Kelsey Jones to talk about coming up with topic ideas for your blog or other websites. In this episode, Amanda and Kelsey talked about the process of writing an article, hot to get over writer’s block, and how to write top-quality content without burning out.

Here are a few of transcribed excerpts from their discussion, but make sure to listen to the Podcast to hear everything:

How to Come up with Content Ideas for Your Blog

In terms of finding story ideas, the biggest way to do it comes from a lot of reading. Always try to stay up to date on the blogs, and see if there’s anything you can pick out that you don’t understand, or if there’s certain terminology that somebody uses that you’ve never heard before. Then write that down on a piece of paper. You can kind of find a different angle, or it will spark a question in your mind that gets you to write a new article that maybe hasn’t been asked before or covered before.

What about when you needed to brainstorm topic ideas on a specific topic?

If you look at that list and you don’t have anything that falls into those parameters that someone gives you. Then you’re kind of back to square one, and you have to go online. Again, something similar, sort of research random ideas and see if anything gives you any kind of idea on something that you can write about.

The Research Process

Usually I have at least a little bit of research already up and ready to go before I start writing the article. I give them a few reads before I start writing, just to make sure I’m not missing anything. As I’m writing sometimes I’ll leave a space, because I think it would be a perfect spot for a statistic or some kind of a case study. Then I’ll go back to it a the end, and then I’ll research and find the more.

The Writing Process

You can do title first, then sub-headers, and then write the article from there.

If that doesn’t work well for you, allow your generated topic to spark an idea. And then when you write the article, you can write the subheadings first. A lot of times, if it’s a confusing topic, have a little section just about the basics of the topic. It can help you as a writer, because you can get a little more familiar with the topic. It also helps readers do the same thing.

Taking Breaks In-Between Writing

I have to take breaks in between, for sure. It can definitely be very daunting, but I have a schedule that I try to stick to that works pretty well.

In the morning I make sure that before I check any social media, and before I leave my room, I do a certain amount of things. I sort of set goals as the day moves on. Which does help me not go crazy.

Writing Top-Quality Content Without Burning Out

I guess the biggest thing I would say for that is it all comes down to what you’re writing about. I would say spend a lot of time of thinking of quality good ideas that maybe other people haven’t written about before. Even if it takes you a few hours even, just to come up with some really good ideas. That’s what keep the writing quality, I think.

If you’re just writing something just to get it done, and it’s obviously you know everything there is to know about it, that’s not fun for you as a writer. Also those articles never do very well, so my advice would be just spend time on thinking of ideas.

Getting Over Writer’s Block

When I do have something to write about and I do get writer’s block during the article, generally what I’ll do is I’ll start with the subsection that I think is easiest. Even if it’s not first, and I’ll just get that done and out of the way. Then I find that that gets me rolling a little bit. Gets me a little more motivated. Then it starts to help me just write the whole thing and get a little deeper into it.

I also sometimes will write the conclusion, and or the introduction first. I feel like those are pretty easy to write, and it kind of takes the pressure off a little bit. That kind of put into perspective for you as a writer, where you’re trying to go.

Guest Writing for Other Websites

I would definitely say that’s difficult. I worked at Business.com, so I’ve been doing this for about four years and it was a little bit easier four years ago, to be honest. I was able to build up a pretty big portfolio of my own writing, so when I go out and talk to editors, I can tell them that I’ve already written at this site and that site. I have examples of my work, and that usually helps a lot.

To have your name out there, to have your face out there. I’d say it’s kind of a long process, but it’ll happen.

I used to have to be especially proactive and talking to people, and asking them if they wanted an interview with me. Things like that, and I got ignored a lot but it works out in the end.

Tips for Writing High Quality Articles on a Reasonable Pace

Don’t get in to far over your head. I know everyone always says, “Oh you need content, content, content. Frequency all the time.” That is still important, but the most important things is that obviously you have the time to write.

If you’re struggling with your own blog, sometimes it helps if you have guest writers every once and a while to just take the pressure off of you a little bit. Another thing, like I said before, just spend time on coming up with good ideas, and that’s how your content is going to be quality in my opinion.

Talk to people. See what people want to read about. See what you want to write about. Then that usually makes for a quality article. That actually won’t take you as long as you would expect. Sometimes the fun articles are faster to write than the boring ones that you know everything about.

Tools and Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• Quora
• Reddit
• Content Idea Generator by Portent
• Content Topic Ideas Generator & Brainstorm Tool by RYP Marketing
• HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Amanda DiSilvestro and Kelsey Jones:

• Download and listen to the full episode at the top of this post
• Subscribe via iTunes
• Sign up on IFTTT to receive an email whenever the Marketing Nerds podcast RSS feed has a new episode
• Listen on Stitcher

Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

 

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Alex Brylov/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo #2: Image by Aki Libo-on

 

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: iTunes| Android| RSS

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