Fun Ads for Facebook
I ran across a great ad today on Facebook that was done by Goupon. It was targeted to the Seattle area and the image was of a Pig in rain boots. Anyone who is a Seattleite will get it. Since Pike’s Market is one of the more famous attractions in Seattle, and the statue of the Pig at Pike’s Place entry combined with the pig wearing red rain boots symbolizing how much rain Seattle gets, it made for a cute ad that I wanted to click on. This well thought out ad and image sticks in the mind and creates a fun want to click on ad. Facebook has such incredible targeting options that if you select the right combination of targeting, call to action message and images you’re sure to win clicks. According to Web Trends who points out an “international survey by DDB, fans stated that they are still primarily on Facebook for fun.”
There are many tips on creating a great Facebook ad that will encourage clicks and interaction. Changing wording and images often and running test to see what combination works better. Also focus on highly targeted ads and understand you want quality over quantity. Facebook has targeting by interest and even Birthday targeting, so use some creative mojo and you’ll more than likely have a great campaign. Facebook has some great information about all the different targeting options that you can find in their help center.
Recently I was reading about how being yourself and being opinionated within social media circles is more effective than staying neutral. If we follow that same thinking in the advertising we do on Facebook then it goes to reason that ads that are more fun and engaging will be the ads people are more willing to like and share.
Don’t under estimate the power of Free or BOGO, buy one get one on Facebook can go a long way especially if you let the user buy a product from you and select a Facebook friend to send the free one to.
If you’re serious about advertising on Facebook and want to make it successful get advice from others who have had good responses or use a social media agency with proven results. For more great tips I recommend reading: 15 Tips for A Successful Facebook Ads Program by Adam Riff at Search Engine Land.
Did Matt Cutts Cut His Own Throat On Keyword Not Provided Percents?
If you’ve been reading about the numerous complaints on huge amounts of loss keyword knowledge based on Google’s new encrypted search for logged in users your not the only one. With this new privacy lock down on keyword queries and the large percent’s that are showing up as (not provided) it has many of us scrambling to try to figure out how we will make up for the valueable loss in keyword query data.
I have been feeling the big impact of Google’s new encrypted search. My sites and clients sites along with so many other sites and agencies, have had a tremendous loss in keyword knowledge. We now have no idea about large amounts of keyword queries that helped determine what keywords were driving site visitors, and this is causing a wave of outrage! Matt Cutts believed the loss of keyword not provided data would be in the single digits, and this is not at all the case. SEOMoz Rand Fish has posted some great charts and percent losses over at their blog and many of his blog comments can be found crying about this new change Google’s Matt Cutts smacked us with.
The percent’s are increasing daily in most everyone Google Analytics tool and soon I predict 80% of sites will see a 30% loss in keyword query data. My message to Matt Cutts is “Mark My Words Mister, You’re in for a Fool Hearted Folly when it comes to making the choice at dropping logged in user’s keyword search data. Yup you heard me right, I am predicting 80% of all sites Matt Cutts and Google said they apparently studied before making this move,will end up loosing close to around 30% of their keyword data by the second quarter of the New Year. I have already heard of sites loosing up to 50% and this is going to be hurtful to all marketing firms who help clients improve positioning for queries. It is sad that Google is doing this and I suppose they have their reasons because of their privacy issues in the past, but this is going to have a larger ripple effect than Mr. Matt could have imagined! But hey no one is perfect however I think we may be in for a frustrating bumpy ride on learning to live without the info we once had.
Creating a Facebook Page with Wix
I just starting using Wix to create Facebook pages and I really like it. I would love to try out Pagemodo but currently I am having some log in issue with it so I found Wix and have created a new Facebook site for one of my clients. You can see their Facebook site here: http://www.facebook.com/AllenMarineInc. It was fairly intuitive using Wix Facebook Page creation tools. They have many templates which are easy to modify and customize.
I really like all the features and am excited to try the ecommerce tools for Facebook pages. I believe having a lead generation form on a business Facebook page is useful and it was easy enough to set up a contact form. You just need to make sure to include the email you want the leads to go to. You can then take the leads you get and enter them into any email tools you have.
To use or not to use a robots.txt file
I am working with a client who is working with me and another agency. I recommended to the client that since their campaign landing pages are being used for generating leads and since there may be issues with the content having little value or even potentially duplicate content, they create a folder for me to place their landing pages in that we would then disallow bots to crawl these pages within a folder using the robots.txt file. The other agency came back and said they recommend against using a robot.txt file for this and we should just let the bots crawl those pages. I then decided to do some investigating into this and found out that even Google gives two opinions, in one place Google says use a robots.txt file and in yet another place says no do not use a robots.txt file.
Quote from this url:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359
“Google no longer recommends blocking crawler access to
duplicate content on your website, whether with a robots.txt file or other
methods.” ……… A better solution is to allow search engines to crawl
these URLs, but mark them as duplicates by using the rel=”canonical”
link element
Then on a different page Google says this:
Quote from this url:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”
OK Google what is it to be? Do we use the robots.txt file or do we not use the robots.txt file for a situation like this? I have found myself a bit more confused than I was before and am going to continue to look for some answers from Bingahoo to see how they handle all of this robots.txt and canonical url stuff. If anyone else has any recommendations on what they feel is the best way to handle content that may have little value or could cause duplication issues please leave feedback 
Competitive Chart
Competitive charts
I wanted to show how to create a competitive chart that will help show visually how a site is doing traffic wise against its competition. Do you miss the charts that you could create for free with compete.com but now those charts are only available for paid pro accounts? Here’s a solution to help you create the same type of competitive charts for multiple competitors. Go to compete.com and enter your site or your competitor’s site and click the go button. You will get a page with the competitive information and you’ll see the traffic graph for that site on the right hand side. Next you’ll want to export the CSV and once you open the file you will see data like this image below:
Keep the monthly data and the unique visitor data, then enter other competitors
one by one and repeat downloading the csv for each. With each new competitor copy
and paste the unique visits into the next columns within the same spreadsheet
and enter the competitor name at the top. When you’re done entering the data your
spreadsheet will look like this:
Highlight the data and choose insert > line (chart)
I ended up breaking out the major carriers and the lesser to
help give each chart a better representation. When you’re working with small or
mid-size businesses who may have longer term goals to compete in the larger
markets it is good to show these types of different charts.
Seattle Area Farmers Markets
This was my first attempt at creating a location-based targeted category listing page. I have been purchasing a few new domain names to start doing some new website projects with. So far I have been doing different contract consulting projects and working for other companies doing marketing and SEO. I have done a good job for all of the companies and clients I have worked for and wanted to use these skills to start a few of my own websites. I figure if I can help smaller and larger companies grow their organic search and increase conversions for them why not try it for myself.
The tools I used to create this map and farmers market listings where BatchGeo and Factual. I created this Farmers Market in WA state map and listing page within less than 5 minutes after glancing through the documentation on both the sites. I found Batch Geo to be extremely easy to use and FUN! I am planning on creating some targeted landing pages using Batch Geo & Factual data for location-based geo targeted categories and using the iframe within my content. I am really excited about the un-ending possibilities for adding local marketing to different sites and creating landing pages that will hopefully help me reach a more specific targeted market and create more conversion by doing so. I will try to add some more links to the pages and sites I create to help show examples of what can be done with programs such as Batch Geo and free data from sources like Factual.
Seattle Area SEO Services
Offering 15 years of online marketing experience working with both large to small companies.
