Brian Carter will be speaking about “Competitive Intelligence” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
Before search, I was an acupuncturist. I wrote a book about acupressure, herbs, and foods (which you can still buy on Amazon, and on the back I’m wearing a very nice sweater), and created a big acupuncture website that eventually taught me a lot about SEO and AdSense.
After I decided acupuncture practice wasn’t for me, I started freelancing in PPC and SEO on the strength of my first big client. Then I was ecommerce manager for a while for a Southern California outdoor retailer. It was depressing, so I became a stand-up comedian.
I joined the agency world in 2007, becoming director of a new SEO, PPC, and Social Media department for Fuel Interactive in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Now I run that department, hire and train SEO/PPC/Social Media experts, and stay hands-on with client work.
I also cofounded TweetROI, a paid twitter advertising platform that uses proprietary UserRanks to gauge Twitterer influence and help ensure a social advertising ROI. And I’m getting my feet wet as a humorous, motivational, business speaker, which I definitely enjoy.
2) There’s lots of debate on the distribution of “click credit” to a multiple-click sales process. Can you give me your thoughts on this issue?
I think it’s complicated 😉 As an industry, we’re behind on this, because as soon as you start showing ROI, if any is missing, you’re giving decision makers only a partial picture. If one of your marketing channels is helping but not getting credit, and the decision is to cancel it, then your other efforts may lose steam. We definitely need, as an industry, to move to partial attribution. It’s a mess in terms of who gets how much credit, but there are already standards for whether to give more weight to first vs last-click depending on whether your aim is more awareness building or direct response. And also important is making sure traditional channels are tracked in the new mindset: is PR using a vanity URL to help us track things? Are billboards using them? If so, it could help them get more credit than they’re currently getting.
3) I’ve noticed a lot of changes & improvements recently to the Google Content network. For those who dismissed this option up until now, can you give some reasons why they perhaps should reconsider?
The reason Content network got such a bad reputation initially is because people were constructing Content ad groups just like Search ad groups. That never worked very well, and I don’t know that it was ever advised by Google. From our interactions with several sets of Dedicated AdWords Reps, I know they’ve spent a lot of time internally figuring out better ways to construct Content campaigns- they really had to brainstorm and do their own tests to get the best results from their own system. There are several approaches now. We’ve tested them all, and – not surprisingly – some work for some things and others work for others. As always in AdWords, you have to test. Content is less targeted to what the searcher is looking for than the Search network is. Sometimes it gets good ROI, but overall it’s a second priority to the Search network. If you’ve maximized your spend for Search and need to spend more, testing Content is a good idea. It might work for you.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.