Upon recent viewing of the very serious movie No Country For Old Men, my friends and I could not help but hysterically laugh when Josh Brolin appeared on screen. We immediately identified him as Brandon “Brand” Walsh from our favorite childhood movie The Goonies.

The “Brand” recognition was so strong that we had a hard time taking this very serious character, seriously. While my friends and I may not be the most austere movie watching audience, this got me thinking about how branding can create a lasting impression on consumers. Specifically, this “Brand” recognition can be applied to the effect a brand can have on your direct response search campaign and how to measure the effectiveness.

For as long as advertising has been in existence, branding has been a major goal for marketers. Branding typically has taken place offline, but in recent years we have seen a significant shift in ad dollars spent towards online branding. Up until recently, the major goal of any Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign has been direct response, with the goal to drive customers searching for a specific product or service to drive sales or leads.

Search Engine Marketing has increasingly become a medium for branding, whether it was intended or not. Direct response SEM campaigns create brand awareness with each impression. The bigger your campaign, the greater your reach and ultimately the impact of your branding.

For example, if your ecommerce store, “XYZcomputers.com,” is matched to the keyword “custom computers” and every relevant variation and your text ad displaying XYZcomputers.com is triggered with a high frequency, your brand will be associated with the sale of custom computers. To measure the extent of that association, two factors must be monitored closely.

1) The number of impressions and clicks generated on your brand name keywords in the major search engines,

2) Direct type in traffic,

Looking across multiple direct response campaigns, I have noticed a steady growth trend in the effectiveness of each brand. From the time campaigns launch, we see an increasing volume in brand name search volume, type in traffic, and ultimately an increase in sales/leads. The “Brand Effect” can be seen most everywhere, it is all just about looking at the “Data.”

How landing page load time can affect your Quality Score

Earlier this month Google modified their Quality Score algorithm to include an assessment of landing page ‘load time’. Incase you are not familiar with landing page terminology; the ’load time’ refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your working landing page, after they have clicked on your ad. If you check out the Keyword Analysis page you should be able to view your load time grade.

If your keyword was given the, This page loads slowly grade, your quality score will take a hit. If Google finds your page to have an acceptable load time your Quality Score won’t be impacted and you will receive the very exciting, No problems found, grade. If however, Google finds your landing page’s load time to be faster than the average in your server’s geographic region, your Quality Score may be positively affected.

Speed is now an important factor in determining the Quality Score of your landing page but not the only one. Google wants publishers to create landing pages that feature unique and relevant content and also are quick to load as this improves the users experience. Advertisers benefit from fast loading landing pages because users are less likely to bail on a site that loads fast as lightning versus one that makes you want to gauge your eyes out from boredom.

So, How does Google grade the load time? Well, First, they look at the destination URL associated with a specific keyword. If you have a destination URL assigned at the keyword level then your grade will be based on that specific URL. Otherwise, Google will grade you based on the slowest load time among the ads in the ad group. Google will take into account your hosting servers geographic region and calculate the grade in relation to the average to other servers in that region.

Tips on improving your landing page load time

If you find that some of your landing pages are reporting a bad grade on their load time fear not. There are many ways of speeding up your load time and Google re-evaluates load time grades on regular basis. Follow some of the tips below and should see lower minimum CPC bids and an improved Quality Score.

General Tips

1. Use fewer redirects
2. Stay away from using interstitial pages.
3. Use iframes only when necessary
4. Take out any unnecessary multimedia ( songs, very large images, videos, background music, etc.)
5. Compress your images as much as possible. If you use Photoshop you can use the, Save For Web option to find the best possible compression setting.
6. Use GIFs wherever possible – as long as they are not the animated kind.
7. Use the height and width tags on all your images. This lets the browser know where everything is before the images are loaded and will give your users a better experience.
8. Remove the empty lines spaces between your code.

I think this is super scary.

As reported today in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, wireless carriers are moving towards making GPS available to its customers, for the purposes of tracking the whereabouts of their friends in “real-time.” Wow.

Yes, I know, global positioning system technology in cell phones is nothing new - I use it to get driving directions on my phone when I am lost (this happens a lot). I think it’s great. All I have to do is say where I am and it tells me how to get where I’m going. Lovely.

The problem? I don’t want everyone else to know.

On one hand, I see a value in people-tracking. There are definitely those five to ten people I will talk to on any given night, the ongoing text messages saying “Are you on the Westside?” or “We’re at the beach to the left of the pier, come meet us.” But what about the fact that technology is not fool-proof?

No, technology is not fool-proof. I know I’m not the only one out there who has had their personal lives disrupted and relationships challenged by the voicemail that was never received, the email that never actually sent, the revealing text message accidentally sent to the wrong person, or the Facebook message posted on your wall that you didn’t want him or her to see but nevertheless forgot to adjust your privacy settings. In some cases, user error or sheer coincidence is to blame - in many others, the confusion is a result of a technological error.

Keeping this in mind, making people-tracking widely available to cell phone users opens up the possibility for big time trouble. I know the wireless industry is aware of this, and the potential for major problems is largely the reason behind them having waited so long to launch the service. Still, the steps the carriers are taking to make the technology safer, i.e. limiting its use to those 14 years older and above, reminding users during the first few weeks that the service is on and they are being tracked, making tracking possible only among those who have purchased the service, and allowing users to turn the service “on” and “off” just aren’t cutting it.

What happens when you “forget to turn it off” or accidentally give access to someone you frankly wish you hadn’t?

I know there are some out there who may think I’m “small-minded” and that I just don’t “get it.” And while I believe that people-tracking is exceptionally useful in some situations, i.e. making a film on a rugged location, camping with a large group of people, or taking the kids to Disneyland, I wonder if we aren’t making things more complicated as we adopt new technology, both on and offline.

Combine the advantages and pitfalls of GPS and other wireless technology with the benefits and downsides to online social networking (downsides including the Mystalking and Facestalking phenomena), and we know more about our personal network than we ever have before. Still, without a context from which to interpret the virtual and digital footprints of our friends and loved ones (and in many cases, there isn’t one), who is to say we aren’t driving ourselves crazy with a bunch of information we just don’t need to know?

YouTube recently launched their own version of Google Analytics known as YouTube Insight.

As mentioned in their blog, this tool is available for free to all YouTube users, partners and advertisers.

What exactly does this mean?

Users now have a stronger tool to analyze the metrics of both the page views and popularity of their videos. YouTube Insight also goes into detail by sorting data by countries and given time periods (ranging from 5 days to 1 year max).

Insight is particularly powerful to the music industry, where they can now track artist and music video popularity by region, view popularity peaks, and further coordinate their marketing efforts with regions where their artists are doing well.

It would be interesting to see if there are plans in the near future to implement any deeper analytics or features already available in Google Analytics and Webmasters Central, especially since Google owns YouTube.

Top features we would like to see:

• Traffic Sources - Where are the clicks coming from? Are they tied to a blog post? What if the blog post is a negative one?
• Keywords & Searches - Is the traffic coming from searches for certain keywords? How is the video ranking for those words?

It will be interesting to see if this drastically changes our perception of what a “successful” YouTube video actually is. Unless Insight can prove otherwise, I’ll just continue to assume that the skateboarding dog is a worldwide hit.

In recent months, the US economy has taken a turn for the worse. The lucrative “housing bubble” of past years has metaphorically burst, the stock market is exhibiting even more instability than usual, and long standing financial institutions have crumbled under the ever increasing weight of defaulting loans. All are interrelated and I point them out because they are clear signs that the US economy is in a period of slow down. Realistically, it is more a period of normalization from the over abundance and overreach of years past.

Prices at the pump will easily soar beyond $4.00/gallon this summer causing a far reaching chain reaction on the economy. This has already begun to play out in certain industries. Just last week, Delta Air Lines said it is going to offer voluntary severance payouts to roughly 30,000 employees–more than half its work force–to deal with soaring fuel prices. Unemployment will no doubt rise and more Americans will be left looking for work that isn’t there. So how is Search Engine Marketing, an industry dominated by businesses with small advertising budgets, going to remain unscathed and possibly flourish?

With more Americans losing their jobs, people will turn to the only alternative they have to sustain a decent living: the Internet. One could argue that the most economically effective way to market a small business is through online advertising. It is the only place where a relative newcomer or innovative start up can actually compete with industry heavyweights. For a couple hundred dollars per month, a small time entrepreneur can effectively advertise through the search engines. By comparison, a 30 second television ad on one of the nation’s top 10 shows will set you back anywhere from $300,000 to over $1 million.

Under these circumstances, search marketing is less of a discretionary income expense and more of an essential expense. I’m sure my college economics professor would disagree out of principle, but this brings up an interesting point. If during a market recession, an individual’s/family’s sole income source is their home business, then doesn’t the advertising of that business become a necessary expense–an expense so essential for survival that it becomes intertwined with other necessary expenses, such as clothing and shelter?

This means that during a market recession, when stable income is much harder to come by, the demand for effective search engine marketing actually grows. This is not necessarily just applicable during a recession, but the trends become much more exaggerated in this instance. In times of financial strife, online advertising is the one saving grace for consumers trying to keep food on their table and clothes on their backs, by means of their personal businesses.

The main difference between search marketing during a recession and during times of financial growth is that the type of expense changes. During bull markets, search marketing is more of a luxury expense for people trying to start another business, often to create a secondary source of income. This definitely places this form of advertising in the discretionary income column, but this systematically changes to necessary income with the degradation of the economy. What was once a luxury for a secondary source of income now becomes the sole means by which to promote a single source of income.

A market downturn will not affect every industry in the same way and in cases like search engine marketing; it will actually help spur growth. The decline in traditional forms of advertising, with their extreme barriers to entry due to high costs, has been both created by and continues to weaken as a result of search marketing. This further increases the impact of online advertising on the economy. As the economy continues to change, it will no doubt create new challenges for the search engine marketing industry, but at its current rate of growth and innovation this should have little effect on its continued development.

Obviously, this is a hypothetical exercise in economics and its effect on search marketing. Many of the examples are generalizations and the aforementioned effects are always more pronounced at the lower end of the income spectrum. But it is still useful to engage in such discussion because it better helps discover why consumers turn to search marketing and as a corollary how we can better tailor our services to fit their needs. While a recession is never good for anyone, it can have some dramatic unforeseen effects on certain industries. And while no industry is completely recession proof, at this point in its very young history, search engine marketing is about as good as it gets. Class Dismissed.

How do you explain the advantages of local online marketing to a layman? More specifically, how do you explain the intricacies and advantages of a local online marketing campaign to a small business owner that does not know the difference between a server and website? How can you explain that a website alone is not efficient at driving new business? These are the questions that have been plaguing me for the past six months, and I still don’t have the answers.

It is clear that the Internet is here to stay and many small business owners are accepting the idea that online marketing is important. Unfortunately, it seems the general consensus among people with limited online experience is that all they need is a website. This misconception makes it even more difficult to explain the importance of local search engine marketing. Moreover, it seems small business owners tend to rely on information they hear “around town” from people with equally limited knowledge about online marketing, which further complicates the problem.

Typically, I try to change their mindset with this reasoning;

Standing alone, a website is a great source of information for a current client base and anyone that may have been referred directly to the website, but how is anyone else going to find it? It is essentially a needle in a haystack unless you actively drive users to it. And you do that with “search engine marketing,” or “SEM.”

Developing a website already seems like a giant leap into an unknown realm for many small business owners. The idea of taking the next step and marketing that website can be downright scary unless the return on the initial investment is realized. Unfortunately, when a website alone does not produce the expected results, as is often the case, many small business owners get discouraged from spending any more money to market online.

I have had people explain to me how disappointed they were with the performance of their website - some even considered going back to the yellow pages. In case you don’t remember, the yellow pages is that thick yellow book that sits on your desk and never gets used. There is no question that local search engine marketing is quickly becoming the most popular form of search used by people searching for local services.

For these reasons, it is key to bind website development and local search engine marketing together when explaining online marketing. It is important to present them as a single idea – an online marketing solution. Although launching a website and SEM campaign together may seem daunting and expensive at first, the combined effort dramatically increases the potential success of an online campaign.

While presenting a website and SEM campaign together is clearly a step in the right direction, it is still difficult to break the mindset that online marketing is a risky investment. I suppose I could develop a study that would dig deep into the psyche of small business owners to better understand how to market to them; however, I’d like to ask your advice first. What do you think? Any thoughts?

“The term Viral video refers to video clip content which gains widespread popularity through the process of Internet sharing, typically through email or IM messages, blogs and other media sharing websites. Viral videos are often humorous in nature and may range from televised comedy sketches such as Saturday Night Live’s Lazy Sunday to unintentionally released amateur video clips like Star Wars kid, the Numa Numa song, The Dancing Cadet, and The Evolution of Dance.” -Wikipedia

The Viral video is a recent phenom of the ever-evolving “web.” With its fast-growing popularity these videos provide free content to advertising cash cow mega-sites. Websites such as Collegehumor.com, YouTube.com, Flurl.com, Break.com and so many more bring in millions of dollars of revenue from their user submitted content. Because of this, it’s no wonder that companies are looking at Viral Videos in a different light.

As is the nature of viral videos, they spread like a virus. They inundate your inbox, fill up your chat windows, or make a buzz around a coworkers monitor – creating a new avenue of marketing possibilities. With each set of eyes trained on these videos, from all walks of life, companies are now originating their own Viral videos.

Not unlike the homebrew versions, these too appear shaky, out of the ordinary, and unexpected. They come as off-roading stunts with impossible gravity defying tricks, or funny spins on everyday occurrences; the seemingly mundane father and child playing hide and go seek until it is revealed that the child has somehow attached himself to the ceiling. The only difference between these videos and the user submitted versions are marketing, branding, and a sales pitch being attached.

These videos sometimes don’t even state which company they were advertising at the video’s conclusion. As if they got away with some sort of subliminal marketing tactic. With a closer look you realize the off-roading truck is the latest Ford model. The kid on the ceiling ate some new radioactive version of Cheerios before his spiderman-esque like ascent.

Aside from this model of Viral video, you have the internet celebrity - the homebrew, webcam, free content giving uploader who “made it”. These faux celebrities gain fame from creating their own Viral. Tay Zonday would fit into this category with his smash hit “Chocolate Rain” of April 22, 2007. He has garnered 16,620,325 views and more daily since its release. This Viral buzz made it possible for him to be picked up by other websites as well as mainstream media, most notably an appearance as a live musical guest on “Jimmy Kimmel Live”. Even the “Chocolate Rain” star would sell out 7 months later with his collaborative remix with Dr. Pepper, touting their new flavor “Cherry Chocolate” with a professional music video for the song “Cherry Chocolate Rain.” The video was a polished, remixed, overly-produced, rapper-included…advertisement – latching on to Tay’s success as a Viral video star. Before I start to digress I will return to the main focus of this post. Is it appropriate for advertising firms to take advantage of the user-submitted forum for financial gains, and what affects will it produce if this trend continues?To keep it short and sweet I have to say it will ultimately be up to the users. These outlets are for the users, and basically by the users. If they don’t want to see these videos or be tricked into watching an advertisement, it will be up to them to change it. On the other hand, as with Super Bowl commercials, if they entertain the users sufficiently to deflect the bother of watching an ad, then all seems fair. You are paying for the entertainment via a product placement. As with all things American, monetization of new avenues is inevitable. And the inevitable has gained steam.

Last week I sat down with Zorianna Kit as part of BNET’s Dog&Pony interview series, which provides daily, quick-and-dirty interview with Southern California business executives, entrepreneurs and investors.

“Dog and Pony on BNET is the daily interview show of new business ideas. For entrepreneurs — and intrapreneurs — who are implementing better ways to make their businesses perform.”

Members of the Wpromote staff, like myself, that grew up in Los Angeles’ beautiful South Bay area are deeply familiar with its local paper, the Daily Breeze. The Daily Breeze has been keeping residents of the South Bay in touch with local news in one form or another since 1894 and for those that grew up in here, the Daily Breeze has been a staple in our lives.

On March 22nd, the Daily Breeze’s Muhammed El-Hasan sat down to speak with our fearless leader, Wpromote’s President and CEO Michael Mothner. The purpose of the article was to inform residents of the South Bay of the innovations that are available in the field of online advertising as well as better acquaint them with one of the area’s most exciting online businesses.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Known as search-engine marketing, Wpromote uses its knowledge of how key words typed into online search engines such as Google or Yahoo generate results. Wpromote’s job is to make sure its clients are among the top results.

We at Wpromote wanted to send a “thank you” to our neighbors at the Daily Breeze for taking an interest in our story. Many of us grew up reading local interest stories in the Daily Breeze; it is a special honor to now be a part of one.

In an article by blog extraordinaire, Steve Rubel, he lists that three current Internet careers will soon go the way of the dinosaur. The endangered dispositions are:

1. Social Media Consultant
2. Online Advertising Sales
3. Digital Talent Agent

It’s not so much that Mr. Rubel believes that there will be no use for these professions, however, he feels that those being recruited to manage these tasks will begin to be replaced by those who can simply incorporate the online aspect into a broader role covering all media.

Maybe it’s my mortgage talking, but I’m not so sure that Mr. Rubel has thought this all the way through. The idea that companies would prefer to hire a media consultant, advertising salesman or talent agent (rather than a “social,” “online” or “digital” version of the three) doesn’t strike me as incorrect, but it does strike me as a bit myopic in terms of defining corporate needs. Although I agree with Mr. Rubel’s claim that the online realm is transitioning from the domain of the tech-savvy and avant-garde into what he called the “new norm” of business, I would counter that depending on the needs of a given corporation, specific focus may still be required for the online sphere.

Depending on the priority a company will or must place on its online investment, it is conceivable that the three careers in question could continue to grow, rather than go extinct. Focusing on the Online Advertising Sales career–as this career is essential to my livelihood–I would argue that the proverbial meteor is not on the way. Here at Wpromote, we come across myriad businesses, many of whom do significant advertising through traditional media and many of whom rely solely on the Internet as a form of gathering new business. Assuming that companies like the latter set, that drive sales and leads predominantly from online sources, are not going extinct–and Mr. Rubel makes no mention that they might be–there would essentially be no point in hiring an advertising manager with a broad range of experience across several different types of media. In fact, it behooves these companies to hire a specialist in the online world, as the efficacy of their advertising relies so much more on the ability to stay abreast of new developments in the online world than on new developments in the world of advertising in general.

If 90% of your widget sales come from Google and if traditional media (magazines, radio, TV, etc.) have proven too expensive, too risky or ineffective, you would be better equipped to achieve success with an Online Advertising Guru in your corner than an Advertising Veteran whose experience and knowledge is spread out over several different types of media, many of which are irrelevant to your business.

I agree with Mr. Rubel that the line between advertising, media consultation and talent finding and the online versions thereof is becoming more and more blurry by the day for many firms, perhaps for all of the world’s largest, most powerful firms. However, the majority of businesses out there are small businesses and their needs should not be ignored so cavalierly. For many of them, the Internet, unlike traditional media, has provided an opportunity to compete with the big boys, and as more small businesses come to believe that their best chance of competing is in the online world, more and more online specialists will be in demand.

Perhaps this is why online sales jobs continue to climb, which Mr. Rubel does point out, though explains away in a manner that I would describe as a bit too hasty. Mr. Rubel is a brilliant man, to say the least, but sometimes, if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s just a duck, no matter how much some of us would like to believe it’s a dinosaur.