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1. Make changes that matter.

Don’t just look for what is not performing well in your campaign, look for areas that would have a big impact on your ROI if it were working better. See what campaigns and ad groups within each campaign represent the greatest share of your overall paid search budget.

Once you’ve identified the most critical areas of your campaign to optimize, start by taking a look at your Quality Score. Improving it will help you reduce your cost-per-click in relation to the position of your ads. This involves looking at each keyword’s CTR, associated ads and taking some of the following steps:

1. Create better targeted ad groups.

Look through your ad groups to find keywords with low Quality Score or low CTR and see what ads are showing up for them. Consider placing these keywords in another ad group with ads that are more relevant. In the case of broad match keywords, use the “See Search Terms” report to find some common queries you are getting clicks for. If some of the keywords that often get clicks are relevant to you, consider using them as a phrase or exact match in the same or new ad group.

Besides using the “See Search Terms” report to better target relevant keywords, use it also add to list of keywords that you do not want to target.

1. Curate your negative keyword lists.

Add negative keywords to your list so that your ads show for more relevant searches. You can find these in the “See Search Terms” report.

1. Use broad match modifiers.

If you have not done so already, add the new broad match modifier to your ad groups. This type of matching is more flexible than phrase and exact match while doing a better job of targeting than broad match. Bid on this match type higher than you would on broad match, and lower than phrase and exact match.

Your CTR does not only rely on your keywords, so it’s important that your ads get users to click.

1. Test your ads.

Look for ways to make your ads stand-out against your competition and test different ideas. Let ads compete against each other and gather sufficient data before eliminating one or more ads. When you come across a test result in one ad group, consider applying what you learned to other ad groups.

Everything I’ve listed so far is primarily meant to increase your CTR. But what about making sure that each click is the best click you can get?

1. Filter out unwanted clicks.

Provide information in your ad copy that will deter your most common unwanted customers. For example, if your services start at $5,000, consider using that in your ad copy. This may go against our strategy of increasing our CTR, but its benefits may outweigh the loss by increasing the value of each click.

1. Use match types to control bids.

Look at broad match keywords that are consuming a lot of your budget, without delivering the goods in the form of conversions. Consider reducing your bids on some of those broader keywords and increase bids on phrase and exact match keywords that are delivering good results.

1. Show ads at the right time.

After doing some preliminary testing by showing ads throughout the day and days of the week, configure your bidding schedule to get your ads more attention when it counts.

I’ve covered most things leading up to the click. Now let’s look at what to do about what visitors see after they click on your ad.

1. Improve device targeting.

Make sure that if you are targeting mobile devices that you are sending traffic to a mobile-friendly page and that this mobile traffic is in a separate campaign from your desktop computer targeting.

1. Conduct landing page optimization.

Work on continually improving the conversion rate of your landing pages. At the end of the day, no matter how cheaply you can generate traffic to your website by improving Quality Score or how well you can filter out unwanted clicks, if your pages are not focused on turning each visitor into a client, then you will always be spinning your tires in the mud. If you need a few tips to get you started, check out 84 Tips For A Killer Landing Page Design.

Below is a demonstration of the effects of conversion optimization on ROI:

In this example, ROI increases by 20% for every 1% increase in conversion rate.

During the first day of Social Media Week 2010, Fabio Freyre (Facebook’s VP of Advertising), hinted that Facebook is currently in advanced stages of “developing additional tools and analytics” to measure online and offline engagement within their own platform. These tools will be stronger and more robust than the tools Facebook has previously made available, which merely poll users about brands.

One of the biggest questions regarding social media and engagement is, “how do we measure this stuff?” There are professional agencies that are dedicated to measuring social awareness, buzz, engagement, and ultimately return on investment (ROI).

Specifically with Facebook, how does one know how much value to place on a “fan” (a person who has attached themselves to the Facebook page of a company, brand, or organization) of a particular brand? How much is that fan worth? What is the scale of engagement that fan has with his “community”?

Back in September 2009, Facebook—the reining king of social media, with over 400M users—teamed up with Neilsen to launch a new advertising platform, ‘Brand Lift‘. This is part of Facebook’s strategy to give advertisers something they’ve never been able to achieve with other mediums: instant feedback. Brand Lift allows advertisers to conduct polls among Facebook’s 350 Million+ users, segmenting them by all sorts of metrics, including those who have and haven’t been exposed to the ad. Brand Lift was a big advance in giving advertisers insight of their ROI through online ads and social media. But it’s not enough, and Facebook knows that.

Freyre went on to say, “Have we made progress over the past year? Yes. Are we where we want to be? No.”

He also indicated that Facebook is trying to figure out how to measure the exact value of a fan offline. Measuring offline (‘real world) brand engagement and conversations are the missing metric. Once businesses can figure out just how much they’re getting out of social media, they will know how much effort they should be putting in.

I look forward to finding out more about these tools and how brands will use them in the future.

Here’s how Web 2.0 Expo defined “The Power of Less”:

The theme for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo New York is the Power of Less. The Power of Less doesn’t just mean making do with fewer staff and a smaller budget. It means that constraints drive creativity, whether in business models, design paradigms, or platforms. It means the power of the small screen, the thin client, the streamlined interface. It might mean the power of small teams, or even going solo.

In the official Web 2.0 Expo Blog, Blue Fountain Media Founder and Creative Director Gabriel Shaoolian participated in an extended Q & A.

What follows is just one question from the interview:

Web 2.0 Expo: You say that you use a different process than most to get “to the heart of a client’s business strategies.” How is this different than companies who you consider more wasteful with resources?

Gabriel: All of our projects at Blue Fountain Media are “team” based. When you have an account manager, a designer, a developer and a marketer at the table at the very first client meeting, you are far more likely to emerge with a comprehensive and integrated plan of attack. This not only streamlines the entire requirements process, it allows us to proceed quickly and efficiently with the delivery of the project.

At many companies, the account manager is the only person to meet with the client. This creates terrible inefficiencies:

• The account manager has to take the time to get the team up to speed
• He’s failed to take advantage of the expertise of his team at the planning stage
• There are always communications issues when messages are passed along and not received first hand.

For the full interview, click here.

(source: Laughing Squid)

Web design companies love to tout the awards they’ve won. Many times it is one of their only selling points. Not to say that having an award-winning website under your belt isn’t a nice bragging right to have as a design firm. After all Blue Fountain Media has won its share of awards.  What I would like to emphasize is that winning awards should not be the priority as a design firm.

Blue Fountain Media was founded on the principle that winning an award doesn’t make a website successful.

First, it’s important to define what it means to be a successful website. You have to take into account budget, ROI, repeat visitors, and branding. Are there calls to action? Is the website sticky? Are there Web 2.0 featured implemented, like Twitter integration or dynamic embedded Google Maps? Is there high quality content that will attract links and visitors? Is the website accessible, and friendly to both search engines and users? These are the things that grow a business.

Awards don’t take these factors into account.  Most of them are rewarded based on design, special effects, etc. which may have brought little ROI for the client, but that fare well in awards. The  focus is on  factors that are sometimes less significant to the needs of a business.  Although it’s fine to win awards as a firm – and we have won our share of awards – that shouldn’t be the only selling point a design firm has to offer. If you Google “website design” many of the paid results use the phrase “award-winning,” but once on their website, there is little information about ROI on these award-winning projects.

Our creative director, Gabriel Shaoolian, founded Blue Fountain Media after having worked at a large digital agency. His last project was to build an automobile website that cost over a million dollars. The site won a couple of awards, but he couldn’t see that reflected in what the client made from it. He wanted to start a company that would be fully accountable for results, where websites would be a lucrative investment. The sites we build help companies grow, and if we win awards along the way, it’s just an added plus.

New York clothing store, R.A.G. New York continues to see record traffic and sales on their website thanks to the search engine optimization performed by Blue Fountain Media between April and September 2008.  Our client was even mentioned in the NY Daily News thanks to our work.

See Blue Fountain Media in the NY Daily News

Currently, the website is not running any type of marketing program except through its 6 stores in New York City. The month of April broke all preceding records as can be seen in the two line graphs showing total visits and sales to the website since March 2008:

These results are both due to our re-design of the website as well as an extensive search engine optimization campaign which included months of link building, analysis, and a results-oriented team of dedicated individuals.

Website ReDesign: BioSpecifics gets a professional look and feel

Our Redesign: A broader, more open site with a clean and clear new design, showcasing the products, the company, and their customers, on a tight budget.

Before: A focus on the corporate side, with other aspects de-emphasized.

The Challenge: Create a highly professional site that appeals to biopharmaceuticals experts, but doesn’t intimidate non-experts. Incorporate high-level product discussion, fine-grained social features, and corporate information like stock quotes.

The Work: The focus here was on highlighting the content, rather than creating a full multimedia presentation. This site includes a stock quote module, several discussion forums, and a news page.

The Result: A great looking, informative site that offers up-to-date information on research, products, and company issues.

What’s Cool: This is a site for every audience. Customers, investors, and researchers can all see where they need to go, at a glance.

Good marketing brings in qualified traffic; good design turns visitors into customers. If you can improve both at once, the benefits compound.

The combination of traffic and a good conversion rate can be very powerful.

When we build sites, we’re looking at things from the customer’s point of view. And while our customers value good-looking sites, they’re making an extra investment in order to get a site that brings in more revenue. We’re always able to redesign a site so it gets more revenue per visitor — but what about bringing in more visitors?

If visits go up 50%, and revenue per visit goes up 50%, total sales will rise 125%, meaning that an extra investment in marketing can actually get an even higher return than the original redesign got.

We don’t just focus on hypotheticals, though. Consider one of our clients, R.A.G. New York. We rebuilt their site to make it more user-friendly and easy to navigate, but we also launched a long-term SEO campaign to get them higher rankings for the keywords that matter to them. The result? April traffic is up tenfold from where it was last year. But conversions have also soared — from 1.5% to up to 5% for some pages. This compounding effect means that revenue (and profit) have increased even faster than conversions or visits.

We didn’t stop at redesigning the site and marketing them online, though: we also talked them up in the mainstream press. That’s gotten great results, too: R.A.G. was recently profiled in the New York Daily News.

Also, while most marketing firms are forced to hire outside to help to do heavy web development work, we are able to do everything in-house. Our marketing team sends requirements to our professional development team who then execute any of the on-site edits that need to be made. Many SEO’s profess to be experts in design, development, and SEO, but we prefer to have specialists in each field work on a project.

We’re constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve the results our clients get. From building great websites to bringing in visitor to getting attention from the press, we’re determined to bring our clients attention and income.

Blue Fountain Media isn’t a discount web design shop. From the beginning, we’ve offered a premium service, and we’ve charged accordingly. The web design business is unique in that there are many people with the necessary skills to put together a site — and some of them don’t charge much at all.

Although Blue Fountain Media charges far less than the big agencies, we do charge more than some other web design companies. Here’s why:

• We offer a customized product — the sites we deliver are unique, both on the surface and under the hood. Part of what we charge covers the cost of customizing a site design to fit the exact needs of our customers.
• We’re proactive — when Blue Fountain Media starts to work on a site, we aren’t interested in going down a checklist of incremental improvements. We suggest changes and features that push the site beyond what clients expect. On the marketing side, we use the inherent flexibility of SEO strategies to open up entirely new avenues for successful promotion.
• We measure results, so you’ll get what you pay for — the main reason customers keep coming back to us is that they know what they’ll get for their money. We optimize sites to get results, not to win awards. From our web design to our SEO and PPC campaigns, we offer thorough analytics showing what traffic you’re getting, how customers are behaving, and how you can improve.

We recognize that premium web design and marketing services are not the right choice for everyone. But more and more customers are finding out from first hand experience, the return on investment from working with Blue Fountain Media is unmatched.

Is your website optimized for mobile devices? Even though the latest service providers and phones, like the iPhone, the G1, and the BlackBerry Storm, can handle large amounts of data, images, and even special features like JavaScript and Flash, there are an entirely different set of concerns for mobile devices, and this audience is becoming hard to ignore.

Why should you care?

• The mobile marketplace is still young. Now is the time to get ahead of your competition. Mobile users tend to navigate away from websites that are difficult to use and will go to the competition.
• Mobile web searches shows a desire to take immediate action. That means that your mobile customers are much more valuable. You should not be losing them due to lack of usability.
• You may be sending out emails to people who will be opening your website on their phone. What do you want it to look like?
• The share of your customers searching for your services or viewing your website from their phones is only going to increase in the near future. Currently, 75% of all mobile search is done on iPhones, which only have a 10% market share. This disproportion is likely to correct itself as other phones catch up with the iPhone.

There are also potential reasons why this mobile audience might be even higher value that standard users. First of all, user who reach your site via mobile search are generally not browsing: they are searching out of an immediate need that can’t wait until they return to their desk. This often means that they skip steps in the buying process and are therefore more likely to act on their search results.

Secondly, for B2B websites, you can’t forget about the traveling executive. You might sell a client on a proposal, but he has to get it approved by his boss, whose first impression of your company is on a 2″ x 3″ screen, in an airport, on 3 hours of sleep.

So the main concerns are bandwidth efficiency, usability on a small screen, and searchability.

Optimizing your mobile presence the right way:

You may be tempted to create a separate mobile version of your website (on a .mobi domain, for example). Not only does this create duplicate content which will hurt your search engine rankings, but it’s also more trouble than necessary. Easier and more effective is to just create a separate stylesheet for handhelds. The browser will automatically detect the correct one, and serve the exact same content on the exact same URL, but format it for a mobile device.

On a related note, if your website still used in-line stylings and not cascading style sheets, it should.

Get a list of mobile search engines and directories, especially those related to your industry. Since some phones use proprietary search applications with different algorithms, it’s important to do SEO on their turf too.

Last week we attended Search Engine Strategies New York, the online marketing conference and expo, and one theme that kept coming up in various contexts was the concept of real value. Different industries talk about it different way: in economics it’s “utility”, in customer relations it’s “satisfaction”, but the idea is the same: businesses and consumers alike are paying more attention to each dollar that they spend and how it benefits them.

Among consumers, that means brand loyalty is waning as people search for better deals, perhaps reevaluating and switching brands, or even going with generics. Among businesses, it means focusing more on ROI, and making sure your service providers are getting the right kind of results and giving you the metrics to back them up.

It’s a familiar concept at Blue Fountain Media; we’ve always held ourselves accountable for the success of our clients, focusing on your goals, and only recommending solutions that will yield a return on investment. We enjoy working with clients who feel the same way about their own customers. It was nice to have our strategy validated by others, like keynote speaker John Gerzema, who spoke about the erosion of trust, about the lack of permanence of institutions that used to appear untouchable, but ultimately about the opportunity that the crisis has created for smart companies. It’s a win for the consumer, and a win for businesses willing to take a step back, and make sure that they’re adding value that’s worth paying for.

One of the things that I kept hearing over and over again at SES New York, was that if you are running a social media marketing campaign and it’s not working, just stop it and do something else. If you have a corporate blog and it’s not getting you any attention, start over. If your Facebook page has 10 members, all of whom are part of your extended family, shut down that page. There is no use in sinking time and effort into social media activity that is not delivering results for your company.

Here are a few tips on things to watch out for:

1. Do not add a reviews section to your website if you have no reviews to show for products. Not everyone can be Amazon.com.

2. Don’t hire community managers for your “online communities” if you have no communities to manage.

3. Instead of trying to create groups on every single social networking website, join communities where you can find followers and relevant members.

4. Instead of providing every single possible way of sharing a website (Delicious, Digg, Facebook, plus 50 other sharing websites) offer the ones that are most pertinent to members of your audience. That will probably reduce the list to about 3 or 4.

5. If your company does something really boring, don’t try and make that interesting. Instead create a community around a topic that your customers would care about.