Twitter Account Optimization

Optimizing your twitter account means optimizing it with respect to marketing effectiveness. let us start with registering your username. If you were not an early starter with twitter your favourite user name may not be available now. so, you would need to create something innovative. Here, what should not be done is more important than what should be done. Your twitter handle should not be:

• Containing a number, - or any other special character. Like @dolly21, @dolly_21..
• Too long. Like, @dollythesweetdoll
• Look like impersonator of some other personality or brand. like @dell,
• Giving a hater x message. like @Xkiller, @ihateX, ....
• Too far too away from your personality.
• contain an adjective, unless they invoke humour. like @best
• Focus on a specific trait/feature.
• Displaying your greed.
• Disparaging yourself, like @idiotintown

After that comes the page theme and bio. You may use from an array of themes available in your account or just upload a custom theme. The theme should be reflective of your true self. Professional users should avoid clutters as much as possible. Care should be taken to make it engaging. write few details there,about you which is compelling enough to make visitors come to your user page as often as possible. Drop a few comment, details, testimonials etc., in your theme or even write some mind blowing link/details there. Make good use of the entire real estate.

Bio should be honest but add few words of humour too. A good piece of humour, honestly written makes you an interesting guy. on Internet it spreads like fire. Don't leave anything and you should not fill anything which you genuinely are not. People on Internet gets detected very easily when they behave dishonestly!

After completing these steps comes to tweeting and following. It is advisable not to start following aggressively till you have 10-15 quality tweets in your account. Add some of your friends but try to follow some reputed twitterers of your field. Re tweet them comment about them and after that follow people who are mentioned in their tweets.

Since, you have no control over who follows you, you should only manage who you should follow. Following your own followers alone is a bad strategy and you actually grow stronger by following good tweeterers, does not matter whether they follow you or not.

Managing following list is a never ending process and you must follow informative and interesting twitterer. According to the Media Guru Robert Scoble, real secret of twitter lies in following!

Twitter is all about tweeting and following. Before, you have started tweeting, make a policy of what to tweet? and when to tweet? Don't start spewing anything that comes to your mind. It is better to have a strategy on frequency and kind of tweets. Tweeting too much causes dissent among your followers, who has certain expectations from you. Try a mix of tweeting about yourself and tweeting on the subject you have chosen.

Be generous in recommending your followers and someone you admire in #followfriday, #followreader or similar twitter events. Some, of the bad tweeting strategies which you should not be following are:

• Copying others tweets and behaving as if it were your own.
• Repeated rants on same thing again and again.
• Tweeting at a very high frequency, about same thing just to grab the attention of followers.
• Ignoring questions/queries/concerns marked @yourusername.
• Repeatedly sending messages to someone, who does not want to hear from you.
• Sending tweets which are actually ads.
• Tweeting about an article which you yourself haven't read.
• Tweeting about office culture, your boss or organization, which you are not supposed to do.

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Ads on Twitter - Would Twitter Always Serve Third Party Ad Tweets?

Twitter till now have no revenue model. However, there are third party applications available, which are promising, advertisements on twitter platform. There are three kind of models available for marketers to advertise on twitter.

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  CPM model of advertisement, through Be A Magpie. In this auction only the highest bidders ad gets triggered at the rate decided by the second highest bidder, for the same category. So, if you are bidding through this model, you need to bid very high for your ad tweets to appear. You have to prepay and there is no guarantee your ads would show up till you continuously try to bid more and more. Once you pay for it, keep checking the bids.
  
  
  
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  New CPC model of advertisement offered through twivert, cashfortweet and perhaps many others. In this case you pay per click, and there is fairly higher chance of your tweet ads being displayed. You need to sign up through twitter ID and they have O auth too!
  
  
  
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  Directly contact few Highly influential twitter account holders and ask them to tweet about your product. Recently Jeremy Shoemaker of shoemoney fame reported having been approached by an advertiser. Best for marketers if they can do it, however, twitter account holders, Beware, your reputation might be at stake if followers detect it.
  
  
  

Twitter's TOS prohibits automated tweeting which are intended to spam the system, and perhaps the first two are in violation of it. Third one is a difficult one and if you can do it, you are plain lucky. Great Twitterers, have great followings because of their integrity and if they start serving deceptive ad tweets, followers may not take it kindly. Advocacy may be an option, the silent the better.

All the models above compromises the quality of tweets. Won't it be better, for twitter and twitterers that twitter opens up the system for advertising, may be even through Google adsense's link units in tweets to end all these Not so Ethical looking practices.

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How to Interpret View through Conversion Metric

View through conversion metric which has recently been added to your adwords account, needs some analysis before you consider it a success or failure. Important questions are:

1. What this says

2. What are the ads it take into account

3. Should you add them to conversion through clicks or not

Before you puzzle yourself with these questions, you should read this helpful resource from Google. Important interpretations are:

• This metric says how many people, who saw your ad, didn’t click and got converted

• It takes into account only ads triggered through adsense network.

• For adwords advertisers it will only show conversions on content network.

• It would only show conversion of display ads.

• It won’t work on search network.

• It won’t work for Text Ads.

It is pretty clear, this metric is only for tracking the success of display ads on content network. As the article makes it clear, the cookie in this case is set by adsense code on the page. It means if the page displaying adsense ads is displayed on your system, tracking cookie would get installed. It really does not matter whether your ad was above fold, second fold or blind fold. It would record the conversion if the **Page** carrying the ad is opened and some action has been completed on the site of the advertiser which advertiser has chosen to call a conversion.

If you are an advertiser who is targeting same site through different ad channels then, view through conversion would overlap. It means you won’t be able to know which ad/channel really worked. If you are targeting only through one channel say adwords then you can easily trust the figure what it says, however, it is not clear, whether the system takes into account only the conversion where people haven’t click on the display ads or do they include figures where, although visitor didn’t click on the display ads, he clicked on some text ad and got converted. Whether or not the two columns, conversion after click and view through conversion, has overlap and to what degree. Google or some researcher may reveal it in coming days. Till then just keep an eye on this figure and apply your common sense to arrive at conclusions.

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View through conversion Reveals the magic of Impressions

The new column that appears at the extreme right of your account's dashboard has some magical information to reveal about your ads. Just have a look into the snapshot in the left. It has a view through conversion column, which reports those conversions where people visited the page displaying your ads, didn't click on it and got converted! The figure also reveals View through Conversion is greater than conversion through click!! Of course the account has many Display Ads. Had you ever in your imagination could think of such a situation where impressions are of greater value than clicks. A question strikes our mind, do serious buyers hate clicking on ad and passively and involuntarily reacts to the message? Thanks Google for revealing this.

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Google to Report Conversions w/o Click too!

A new metric is going to be shown into your account very soon - conversion of impressions w/o click. Presently, it sometimes shows and then goes off. It will show you the number of conversions from impressions i.e., people who saw your ad on any site and got converted. It would be the last column in your account, after conv rate 1 per click. This figure might speed up competition for impressions on quality websites. People who were shy of targeting by CPM, may find the information compelling enough to do so in future. The move may heat up the war for impressions on quality network. Also, it will reveal something new about display/image ads. Let us see how much of our belief were correct at least we shall get an opportunity to do some corrections in what we believe till now.

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Adwords Double Serving Policy after Diluting Restrictions.

Adwords Double Serving Policy used to be very stringent before the start of 2009.

• Advertisers were required to maintain one single account, to fecilitate automatic one ad per keyword.
• If you have multiple stores all of which could be advertised on same keyword. you could advertise for only one of them.

Google added following exceptions to the otherwise strict rule:

To protect trust in Google, and to provide a quality experience for our advertisers and our users, the double-serving policy is strictly enforced. Exceptions are granted only in very limited cases. Advertisers seeking an exception to Google's double-serving policy are required to contact AdWords Support.

When reviewing requests, we focus on the preservation of a unique user experience for each site, and also take into account the following:

The destination site for each ad offers different products or services (for example, a large manufacturer with two product sites, one solely for stereos and one solely for computers, both running on the keyword 'electronics')

The destination site for each ad serves a different purpose (for example, one site focuses on product information only, and the other site focuses on product sale only)

Any product overlaps for each ad's destination site are not significant enough to affect user experience

The pricing difference offered by each site is significant and based on the same criteria (for example, if one site includes pricing with tax, the other site must include pricing with tax)

while adding these exceptions, Google also maintained preservation of Unique User Experience. Click on the screenshot on this page to find some of the apparent violations. You may also just run a search query on google.co.in for - hotels in delhi, to find some new innovations for compromising this rule. Is it the Global Economic  Recession impact on Google's Policy!

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Attempts to turn Seth's Advocacy for Sympathy Click into Mass Movement

Seth had said - "If you like what you're reading, click an ad to say thanks." in his one of the controversial blogpost Ads are the new online tip jar, Also, see the first person to react via trackback, Cem Sertoglu of Turkey, Seth further reacted in another blogpost - Beating the status quo, that he didn't mean to advocate Click Fraud, as has been misunderstood by the practitioners of click advertising, rather he wanted to beat the status quo of only hardcore click throughs. Seth's Logic - As clicks would increase, Revenue would increase for Publishers and Advertisers would get more Attention, from people who had mild interest in the advertisement. But, converting mild interest into sales is Profitable. Profitable for the advertiser, for the publisher and for the online industry at large. That is seth's Logic, but from the perspective of Pay per click managers who struggles to eliminate these unwanted clicks everyday, through more focused creatives and more focused targeting, it is not a profitable scenario at all. People practicing ppc knows how tough it is to fight unwanted clicks from researchers and seasonal flurry of traffic on even Search Keywords are. On Search, people are typing in the keywords in the search bar to find what they are served actually, yet it may not be profitable all the time. If you add further load of people who have intent to only click on your ads, it becomes worse. So, converting mild interest into sales is not an easy task, it is far from reality. But, think of the situation where people only click on the ad to just say thank you to the publisher! PPC model is not meant for thank you clicks. It works around conversions and cost of conversions in reality, which are not always within such a comfortable margin to accomodate sympathy clicks, in fact it always pose challenges because its an auction, and competition keeps on pushing up the cost of click. Publishers can benefit from Higher cost of clicks by having Remarkable content (Courtesy Seth who made Remarkability the popular concept), which has the ability to attract relevant traffic and hence good advertisers who would like to compete there for grabbing the attention and click of this traffic. 

It is more than a year now since Seth wrote that controversial post, but why I am discussing it now is the reason I saw, someone trying to advocate sympathy clicking via adwords! There may be others too, but this is the site, I came across, advocating sympathy clicking(or Thank You Click), and asking you to spread the message across the web. Who needs sympathy clicks? Those who have failed to generate quality content, and hence quality followers. Why Seth is advocating it, Perhaps because of This - "I can say this because there are no ads here... ".  Well the website I am talking about has no details of its founders and only have a contact email, in contact.  I also checked its whois info , which does not reveal anything. So, the person behind it does not want to come into light. But, Google should be knowing him, because he is running adwords ads! Does he deserve conversion? You would decide. Can you openly display the badge of a website which does not even reveal a valid contact address?

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Multiple Presence on the same Page - It enhances your Conversion Rate Many Times Over!

Once upon a time People thought, since they have good SEO, and presence on quality keywords they don't need Adwords. Some used to think just the reverse, and perhaps still thinks so, that since they have a good running Adwords campaign, they don't need to SEO their website. Just check your stats and focus on adwords stats where, you had presence both in Organic and paid links. You would notice, you had wonderful conversion rate both in organic and paid. Why this happens? Not only it increases your percentage of links on the page over others, it increases the level of trust of visitors in you. People think since you are also present in the paid link despite being present in organic link, you are the person worth doing business with. Google now offers you three opportunities to feature on the same search page. They are 1) organic Listing, 2) Paid Listing, and 3) Local business listing.  Don't discount any of them. If you are running a hotel, or selling flowers or any kind of business, where google offers all three kind of listings, you cannot afford to go for a strategy around only one of them, because all your serious competitors are present there on all three, and  those who are not would soon be biting the dust, because whatever, single track strategy she is following, would become unprofitable sooner or later. What changed this game? There was a time when people used to advertise on keywords where they are not performing well in organic results. After sometime they found, if they advertise on same keyword where they have good presence organically too, they get great result. The practice started infecting other advertiser and this became an indication for user that what they see once is just a chance, what they see more than once is Genuineness. People want to deal with genuine people world around. Those who are present in all three listing in search get a big edge over those who are not. they see conversions flowing towards them while others would find, the keyword is getting costlier to afford every passing day! In industries where local listing matters the most like florist shops, hotels etc., you cannot afford to survive on a single listing on the page. 

Similar is the case with content network. If you are also showing direct advertisements on the website alongwith the adwords ads on the page, it greatly enhances your conversion rate, compared to what you see with only one of them. Present strategy for online marketing should be domination. Try to dominate the placements as much as you can. Don't spread yourself too far and too thin. Choose the areas where you are strong and don't just give others the chance to take a slice away from you of your meal. If you know of a website where you find great number of prospects, just go and have a deal with them. Have your presence there both directly and indirectly through any third party targeting like google adwords, and just see the difference it creates in your returns on investments. 

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Conversion Optimizer: It does something Beyond Conversion Optimization !

Anyone managing a campaign with at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days can use conversion optimizer. This rule is a big relaxation over the previous rule which required a very higher conversion number within 90 days period. In that way only big advertisers could qualify for it. No more now, however, nearly anybody can qualify now with less than one conversion a day. Let us see how it works:

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  It places your ad into historically high converting zone more often.
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  It manages the bid on its own. So, if exhorbitantly high bid is required to occupy a slot, it would place your ad there keeping in view the cost and probability of conversion.
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  If you are not meeting the required number of conversions within cost your ad automatically slows down.
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  When conversion goes down, it starts pushing your ad into low CPC zone. So, you start getting low cost per click.

Some important observations rearding the behavior of campaigns on conversion optimizer with respect to CPC are:

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  If your campaign is meeting the required number of conversions within the specified cost. Cost per click may be pushed up higher in your campaign. your ads would be occupying some highly coveted slots more often in this scenario.
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  if your campaign fails to meet the specified number of conversions within the specified cost. Your Cost per click will show dramatic fall. You may also see some unbelievable figures of avg. CPC.
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  It works better with Content rather than Search campaigns.

Where lies the Trick:

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  First and foremost, you should not believe what system suggests you to bid. Always choose the most comfortable level of cost of conversion. Check your weekly, monthly, average of cost of conversion and accordingly select a figure.
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  Keep conversion optimizer switching on and off, targeting reduction in Avg. CPC. It automatically produces Quality Score enhancements about which I had talked about in some previous post. Yes, the conversion optimizer needs a bit of shake to make it work properly.
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  Conversion Optimizer works well with campaigns which have even flow of conversions throughout the day. It is not advisable in situations where conversion flows are highly erratic. Your campaign may stop at wrong time, or may continue at a high delivery frequency at wrong times.
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  In case of you disqualify in above mentioned condition, consider using a back up campaign, which is not on optimizer. if you don't have all campaigns on optimizer, you may use it even in the case of diasqualification in the above scenario. Mostly campaigns related to stock markets disqualify. Remember, you should not use high cost per conversion bid in such a case.
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  In a branding campaign, you should use it to produce Low CPC, defining your conversion is a real trick here. Try something near to home page (Landing Page), and home page too!!!

When Optimizer produces Low CPC:

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  If your target is to achieve very low cpc through it, make view of a page, which is not too far away from landing page as conversion. Remember, the more difficult it is for the system to get the desired level of cost of conversion, the lower the cpc gets.
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  System should, however, be able to produce conversions, within not too far away of the limit. Otherwise, it would stop the campaign.
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  Keep on reducing the specified cost per conversion, till the system starts increasing the cpc value. You would be able to discover the best bid that way.
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  Always, give your campaign a spell of manual cpc bidding in between. This will help you create conversion history which is helpful for optimizer to behave properly.

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My Name is Khan: Promotion at Newark Airport

Shah Rukh Khan, the Indian Movie Star, was reportedly detained at Newark Airport, on 15th of August, 2009. 15th of August is celebrated as Independence Day in India. At the backdrop is a similar incident with an ex Indian President passing through almost similar security related checking in India itself by the staff of an American airline. So, the message is Indian sentiments hurt by the conduct of US airport staff who are paranoid against Muslims in general and particularly Indians. Incidentally both the persons associated with the incident are Muslims. Khan being a Muslim last name, and the title of the Film in making. I do not want to allege that Fox and Sah Rukh Khan planned this incident well in advance where everything was preplanned. It may be 100% unplanned, but everything was in right place - the place, the occasion, the person, the escalation. Nothing else could have produced such a great impact. Well, I want to see this movie now, so you and everybody! Many people have alleged that it was a normal incident, even US airport staff confirmed he was freed after one hour and not detained for two hours which many exaggerated reporting claims. If this is normal, was Sah Rukh experiencing it for the first time? Anyway, it should go into the book as a marketing strategy, to be done intentionally in future. Well done Sah Rukh, or even if you did not do it you should thank Newark Airport Staff!

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Adwords New User Interface, Powerful but you should Ponder!

This week Google finally pulled down the old user interface from all the accounts. Many people loved it including me for its classy look, fast download, easy navigation and relevant information. It is gone now, perhaps forever. New UI is there with bundles of features. Since every Adwords user has already been exposed to it, I won't delve into what it contains and what it misses. Some of the feature you should not miss out and that can really improve your campaign's performance are:

• Impression caps on content Ad. Now you have the advantage of limiting the exposure of your content ads by impression. It can be set up at adgroup level and would be great for advertisers who are worried about wear and tear of ad. If you want to know how ads are worn out check this post . Google perhaps have given some thought to it. Big advertisers who are advertising on a very large scale would find it great. It has another side too. some notorious ones whom adsense publishers were trigger happy blocking would find using this feature to pass through block button. It is easy now. Create many adgroups with impression caps on each with different urls. after every cycle of impression each adroup would be triggered. It would be difficult to detect and at least increase the pressure on publishers who want to block them
• Spreadsheet Editing. This feature not only downloads keywords, it can download your ads too with display urls and destination url. It means if you want to export your campaign to some other platform it would become an easy job if the program permits you to feed the downloaded campaign in one go. However, google does not have such a feature to feed such downloaded campaign in other account of adwords, or it least I could not find out.
• Enhanced graphic presentation. You would find graphical presentation with multiple matrices for comparison and trend analysis of the data. Play with it to gain some new and valuable insight changing different attributes. Its a powerful tool, if you can pull out some actionable insight from it.
• Placement report available inside the account. Not only they are available, you can add or block them then and there. You can even download them in .csv format.
• Search Query Report. It is also available inside the account itself. you don't need to go to the Report Center for it. you can add some terms then and there itself.
• Enhanced Keyword suggestion. Now suggested keywords are no more all broad matched. They are there in all kind of matches.

Features are really powerful. They have the capability to pull great data at the comfort of a click. However, taking action based on these data may require some thinking on your part. If you can think and apply at the same speed, you should be able to derive the maximum benefit from it. I would openly say I can't. I need time to analyze these data and apply my thinking. So, I would prefer downloading the reports and ponder a bit on it. I also recommend you to do the same. That is to say some actions you should take immediately on sight but should not give up analyzing the Reports deeply.

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Google Migrates away Pro Center from MCC

Google yesterday migrated the Pro Center to a new home. If you have checked your pro center recently, you would find it has moved to a new page asking you to re login to access. New features include:

• Ability to unlink from your Company's MCC. Now GAP qualified people are no more required to be tied up with the MCC of the company. They can unlink themselves and attach with a different MCC.
• Last 90 days spent is mentioned, instead of the Total managed spent. This is good because Google decides your status according to the last 90 days managed spent only.
• Logo size has become smaller. Earlier Logo used to be much bigger like I have one on this page.
• GAP exam record is mentioned along with the expiry date too. A completely new thing, at least this would remind people when to take the exam, before it expires. Unlike many others I prefer taking exams annually and recommend the same to everyone.
• You also have a message center. It didn't have any message for me so I can't say much about it.

Google seems to be on a change spree these days. After changes in the Adwords User Interface, it is likely they would soon roll out changes at MCC level too.

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Billing Issues with Google Adwords Customers in India

For long Google Adwords Advertisers have regarded payment through credit card to be the best option for paying their adwords bills. There were few hiccups in the system, which resulted into frequent Payment Decline situations, but scenario since, Aug, 1st, 2009, changed completely making it the worst form of payment option. Issues related with payment through credit cards are:

1. It is difficult to authenticate in the first place. Before the first billing of Account creation charge, you have to try it many times.
2. Google has counter imposed manual verification of credit cards on advertisers against the online verification asked by RBI. Many are concerned about the security of information revealed in this process.
3. There are cases where Google has charged more than amount spent and that too multiple times.
4. Ads frequently stops and you have to o through traumatic phases of reviews by their customer support team.
5. There are reported events when advertisers were unable to modify/add credit card information into their account.

Other form of payment which is working well is Pre Payment Through Net Banking, which uses third party gateway. One may wonder why does not google uses similar third party payment gateway for processing credit card transactions. Many people who were using credit card earlier for payment have decided to switch to net banking. It cannot be done within the same account. For this they have to create a new account and choose Net banking as Billing Preference, because billing preference can be edited only once in an account. Would Google be kind enough to waive off Rs 250 charge of account activation for such advertisers???

Indian advertisers had always been affected by the billing related issues with google. Indian Laws and tax structure typically requires some changes in the google's billing system for which google does not seem to be ready. Apart from credit card related issues, there are other issue related to taxes like TDS deduction, where Indian law requires it to be deducted at source and then to be claimed by the service provider. Google wants advertisers should first submit the proof of having deposited the TDS with Govt of India and then claim it from Google. Google does not publicly discloses its PAN number too, which is required for depositing the TDS amount.

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RBI imposes Double Verification of online transaction through credit cards: Google fails to meet the deadline.

August, 1, 2009, was the deadline imposed by Reserve Bank of India, to introduce double verification of credit cards for online transactions in india. All credit cards has to be verified by Visa or mastercard before the transaction is validated. All major payment gateways has already introduced this feature for verification. However, google failed to introduce it before the deadline and it resulted into payment failure in all the accounts which uses credit cards for running their adwords campaign. As an adhoc measure google asked their clients to submit a hard copy of filled up form authorizing them to charge their credit card for dues in their account. Unfortunately, it was introduced too late and clients were intimated only after payment failure, when their ads stopped running. Dual verification where Visa/Mastercard validates the transaction requires a minor tweak into payment gateways. As a workaround, Transaction has been converted to Offline, which takes time and would mean loss both for Google and Advertisers. Advertisers who are facing "payment failure" due to this, need to ask for a form from Google, which they send you in pdf format. Advertisers are required to fill and sign it, and then send it to their Hyderabad, Billing and Payment division through ground mail. It is to be seen how long they take to process and charge these cards manually. In the meantime ad serving has been stopped, of the affected accounts.

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Adsense Heat Map - Why it Fails!

Ever since Google has released its Heat Map, Web Monetization Experts are recommending, shifting the ads along the heat map hot zones. People tried it and what they got, Frustration!

People wondered Why is it that placing ads along heat map fails? It fails because heat map's hot zones are places where people tend to believe it contains Valuable Information. if you serve something which people hate there, you are bound to invite hatred for yourself.

Adsense ads monetize best when you serve them as Relevant information. They work well when you serve them as additional information along with information you are offering. If you try to camouflage your ads as information, users start disbelieving you and your site.

People who are serious about their website should create information bundle around adsense units, rather than spamming the visitor with ads at places they never expected them to be. Some Publishers have tried to put the adsense unit in extreme left below the information they provide. This move is Ok. However, whenever, you create an adsense unit in Heat Zone be cautious, you are not trying to offend the visitor.

Most blunt kind of adsense presentation is when you present it along the Top left corner, considered extremely hot zone. I don't know how many people are successful with that strategy but whosoever had done that, I found them shifting back to their old placement. Placing ads along heat zone does not work. It is the worst kind of adsense management, which should be avoided.

To select the placement you should simply avoid the blindfold. Having done that create information bundle around it which are genuine. A good adsense strategy is to make the ads look like genuine alternative information without trying to hide the fact that they are ads. If they are served as genuine alternative information, people love them. Advertisers too love them. Heat maps are not Panacea to your Monetization woes. They simply tell where people look mostly on the web pages. They expect something useful there, depending on why they landed on your website and atleast they don't expect ads there.

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