This Week in Relevance

Advanced or Needs Sophistication? You make the call.
In Josh Dreller’s recent piece on advanced PPC copywriting techniques, he calls out Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) as a commonly used technique for scaling great copy across a search marketing campaign. In fairness, Josh calls out potential pitfalls of this approach, but we feel that marketers can actually get into quite a bit of trouble when leveraging this approach too broadly as the below example shows – hate to kick a wounded animal when its down, but for the query “oil spill disaster” we see this ad:

Oil Spill Disaster
Stay Updated On BP’s Gulf of Mexico
Response Efforts. Learn More.
www.BP.com/GulfOfMexicoResponse

Clearly BP’s strategy to influence the flow of information surrounding the spill is a sound one, but they’d probably prefer not to echo the public’s sentiment that it truly is a “disaster.” This is just one of many DKI pitfalls – we’ll explore more in later issues.

UPDATE:

BP has now changed their ad on the term “Oil Spill Disaster” to a static Title — great move on their part, starting to understand the potential pitfalls of using DKI.

Location, Location, Location
Wired offered a piece this week on the growing momentum behind Zip+4 targeting online, which would add an incredibly powerful tool into marketers’ arsenals. However, as the amount of data available explodes, the tools and technology required to accurately message to and engage these audiences grows as well. We like the sound of that challenge!

Search Meet Social, Social Meet Search
For years we have heard the somewhat trite but always buzz-worthy phrase, “social drives search.” Finally, with the launch of the “Like” button, Facebook may actually be unlocking the true underpinnings of that phrase. The folks at Business Insider take an in depth look at Facebook’s social search aspirations, and while it is still very early, there are definitely some promising (and relevant) results driven not by crawling algorithms, but social ones.

Relevance Doesn’t Just Matter When You’re Paying
Search Engine Land published some great tips on how to use PPC Copy and relevance scores to drive SEO copy (Page Titles and Meta Descriptions). A simple reminder that relevance should drive every marketing copy decision that we make, not just the ones where there is a monetary penalty for not doing so. We also love the test and learn approach!

Start Thinking About Longer Queries
A new study from ad network Chitika provides some interesting insight into query length and its effect on SEO volume and conversion rate. We all know that query strings are getting longer as users get more sophisticated in their searching, but this study ties actual value towards optimizing meta content towards longer queries. Additionally, in the context of the above story, search engine marketers should be using results like these to help drive their campaign content.