The idea here is that you can use one of their API’s, for example the Adwords API, as long as you utilize a minimum set of functionality that they think is most important. Seems like a fairly simple request right? Well, of the 153 features that Google touts on its list of Adwords functionality, 58% of them are required. So a majority of the available functionality is included in the required minimum. I would also like to point out that this API is not free to use. Companies pay for every call they make to it so shouldn’t they be given a choice as to what calls they make and what features they implement?

Now let’s be clear on what “required” means. It does not mean that your tool utilizes these functionalities to, let’s say, automatically optimize campaigns through the required features for those clients that do not want to manage every nuance of their online marketing campaigns. “Required” means the user must be able to find the feature easily and make changes to it as they see fit.

So if your businesses’ goal is to handle all those nuances behind the scenes and minimize the amount of work your clients need to do to their campaigns, then you are out of luck. If your goal is also to present a clean interface that does not overwhelm first time users, well, sorry, you’re out of luck there too.  I think the obvious use of an API should be to distill information in a different way for certain segments of people and allow them to interact with your service in a different, hopefully better, manner than they can through the interface offerings that already exist. Perhaps I’m wrong but it seems that requiring developers to basically recreate a tool you have already created is a bit short sighted.

With that being said, I don’t think Google is trying to be difficult.  I do think they need to rely on their API to allow other companies to bring them more clients from markets they have not yet tapped. I do believe all of the features listed in the RMF are important when running a successful internet marketing campaign. I just don’t believe that a company should be punished for creating an innovative way for people, who are new to internet advertising, to easily create campaigns without worrying about all the ancillary settings.

Let’s look at an Automated Bid Management feature for example. Auto Bidding is generally based on algorithms that look at a desired outcome, such as a particular position for an ad, and experiment frequently with the bid to attain that position at the best possible price. This feature would obviously utilize the “Edit keyword max CPC” feature that is required by the Google RMF. But just using it would not satisfy the requirement. One would also have to allow the user to be able to change the individual Keyword Max CPC.  Never mind that this is already set by them at the Ad Group level or that the whole point of the service they are paying for is to manage those settings. Never mind that changes made by the user to this setting may throw off the algorithm and cause it to perform at a less than optimal level.

Another example would be a company that builds an application that provides reporting on a user’s Adwords performance in a different way than Google offers.  Let’s say that company polled their target market and found that their customers are only interested in Average CPC, do not care about how it breaks up by device or ad network, and they do not want to see total impressions. Again, sorry, they all have to be included because these items are RMF. It is this kind of rigid regulation that kills potential innovation.

I understand having requirements to protect users (i.e. security requirements) is important.  But I do not understand stifling innovation with an arbitrary list of required items. If a company develops a tool using the Adwords API and they tailor it in a way that brings more people into Google’s advertising fold, then everyone wins. The company earns money, Google earns money, and the client is reaching a potentially new client base. And if that same company does not provide enough functionality or people do not like the way they are presented information, then that company isn’t going to stay around for very long.

Policies like these seem short sighted and Google is not the only company to implement them. I remember some arbitrary rules laid out by some big companies in the past and the problem is that the more of those rules a company has the more people they irritate and then suddenly everyone is looking for an alternative to whatever product that company provides. I know that Google is king right now and they can do whatever they want.  I can think of a few companies that used to have this same philosophy.  But one day they woke up to a world where they were no longer king and realized it is much, much harder to return to the top than it was to get there in the first place.

“Well,” you ask, “what can I, a lowly website owner and potential or current advertiser, do about this dilemma?” or “How do I know if page speed and user experience are issues on my site?”

Answers to these questions vary in range from highly technical solutions to very simple changes that can have an impact on your advertising and overall user happiness in general. You want happy users, don’t you? Their happiness brings you word of mouth referrals to compliment your paid advertising, stretching the reach and value of your advertising budget.

“How do I know if page speed and user experience are issues on my site?”

Page Speed

The general answer here will most likely be: They are. Now, that is a pretty big statement from anyone, let alone a single engineer. And since I fancy myself a scientist, I’ll pass you off to a way to determine the imperfectness of any website known to man. Google Page Speed(https://developers.google.com/pagespeed/). Head there and type the address of your site in the box and click analyze. You should see something. Even Google, Facebook, CNN, and AOL have room for improvement. If your score is higher than 80 and you have no high priority, you’re generally OK. If you only have low priority items, you’re great, I’m a liar and you can stop reading about page speed (You should still check out my thoughts on user experience or the editors may have me flogged for writing an irrelevant blog post).

For more info, read Google’s help page on load time and quality:
http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=87144

User Experience

Page speed is part of a user’s experience. No one wants to wait for a graphics heavy pages to load. Users also don’t need to be bombarded with everything under the sun that you have to offer. Remember that the user searched for a specific thing that matched one of your keywords, so show them that. Never clutter your landing pages with unrelated material and please, PLEASE, don’t put ads on your landing pages. AdCenter recommends not placing “a lot of advertising on your landing pages” but, in my humble opinion, don’t put any. If you are buying the keyword “teddy bears,” don’t land your potential users on a page selling toy trucks and don’t land your users on the home page unless all you do is sell teddy bears. Also, try to avoid redirects on your landing pages. Instead, land users directly on the relevant page itself. And as always, make your landing page relevant to your ads and keywords. If your landing page is informational, don’t try to pepper in keywords. Just write it normally and if your chosen keywords aren’t relevant, maybe you have the wrong keywords.

You can read more about user experience on landing pages at
http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/product-help/adcenter/topic?query=moonshot_conc_aboutlandingpageuserexp.htm
and
http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675

“Well,” you ask, “what can I, a lowly website owner and potential or current advertiser, do about this dilemma?”

Simple page speed improvements

• Be specific: Remove clutter from landing pages. This focuses the user on what you are selling (what you are paying advertising dollars for) and don’t distract users with other offers on the landing page
• Land directly on the desired page: Don’t redirect through a special page, land users on the correct page directly
• Optimize images: If you are using images, make sure they are good for the web. Create thumbnails for large images and specify the sizes in the HTML, if possible. Don’t just specify the size in the <img> tag and leave the image as-is. A 5 megabyte, 15 megapixel jpeg included like so <img src=”my5megapixel.jpg” width=”200″ height=”150″> still requires the browser to download the entire 5 megabyte image and it resizes only after it is downloaded.

Simple user experience improvements:

• Land directly on the desired page: Don’t redirect through a special page, land users on the correct page directly
• Keep your landing pages free of irrelevant information
• Keep ads off of your landing pages. If you want users to see other offerings on your site, create other ads for those offerings. If you are using services like AdSense, don’t put them on your landing pages (this should be very obvious since it could potentially give other sites your advertising budget anyway).

Obviously, this is no small subject and this article just scratches the surface. You can read into the suggestions from Google’s Page Speed tool to find more information about specfic site speed ups. Check out the other links in this post to continue learning about why page speed and user experience are important parts of online advertising.

We all know by now what daily deals site are and we can mention a few from the top of our heads: Groupon, Living Social, and our friends from Tampa CrowdSavings.com . Last year’s Super Bowl brought us the first ads for daily sites like Groupon and Living Social. Daily deal sites have become somewhat of a darling for the media for both good and bad reasons. As companies, they have been able to grow at phenomenal rates that have made their investors very, very happy. They have been able to tap a new way to move coupons online in an effective and cheap manner. On the bad side, a lot has been said about the experience of the small businesses with making the deals profitable. However, it is not the purpose of this blog to discuss if this type of marketing is effective or not for small businesses but more so to understand the difference in intent from campaigns in the search engines and daily deals.

When users search on Google or Bing for something, they are in some level of an information-gathering mind frame. They can be at the earlier stages of the funnel, trying to find a solution or information about a problem or need they have. They can be deeper down the funnel, for example now searching for specific solutions or more defined search queries that spawn after the initial research. In essence they are looking for something. Their intent is defined. On the other hand, daily deals marketing does not rely so much on intent as on convenience and discounts. When I receive my daily deals, I have no specific intent to fulfill a specific need. I am more on a journey of discovery. I want to find good deals or discover businesses that I would otherwise not think about.

As a small business owner you need to keep this in mind when deciding about your marketing. In paid search campaigns you want to be clear about your products and services. You need to make sure your keywords, ads, and landing page are relevant. You are buying clicks from people that are searching for something specific. Give them what they want.

In daily deal campaigns, make sure you do something more than just give a good price. You want to attract clients that are not specifically looking for you. Your only differentiators should not be a good deal, but a good price. You need to come up with an exciting proposition. Make sure your deal is unique and exciting…Not just a pizza for half price.

If you want clients getting to visit your site based on a specific need, do pay per click campaigns on Google AdWords or Microsoft AdCenter. If you want clients to find you through exploration, do a daily deal campaign. My recommendation is DO BOTH. Not one or the other. They both complement each other and will end up providing cross pollination for your small business marketing.

SiteWit provides tools to help our clients build and manage SEM campaigns with little effort or experience on their part. Based in Tampa, FL, our growing team has decades of experience in web technologies and would like to compliment our technical expertise with amazing design talent. We are looking for a User Experience Specialist to spearhead the design of the user interface for our main web application as well as our various company sites. We are seeking someone who understands how to create simple yet captivating designs that make navigating our web application effortless.

Required Skills
● Ability to learn quickly
● Experience with JavaScript
● Experience with CSS and HTML
● Excellent communication skills
● Experience with design tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc…)
● Ability to create designs that work in all major browsers

Desired Interests
● User Experience & Design
● Pushing Interface Limitations
● Design Blogs

Pluses
● Familiarity with JavaScript frameworks (jQuery)
● Familiarity with JSON
● Production quality JavaScript & UI development
● Front-end design experience from concept to mock-up to production
● HTML5 experience

Welcome to SiteWit SMB. We just released this new version of SiteWit which uses the same optimization engine as our SiteWit Agency product but is geared for Small Businesses just like yours.

Please let us know if we can be of any help or if you have any questions or comments on how to market your small business online.

Thanks.

Ricardo Lasa

CEO

SiteWit