Why real time reporting matters for PPC advertising
Real-time reporting helps PPC managers identify trends before they become costly. Instead of waiting for Google AdWords reports, PPC managers can use HitTail to spot abnormal activity in their paid search campaigns in real-time. Watching the real time report in HitTail often shows clicks for broad match keywords that advertisers should not be bidding on or shows a discrepancy in clicks that HitTail records compared to what Google reports. This discrepancy can sometimes be attributed to click fraud.
Here are some examples of both scenarios:
1) HitTail identifies negative keywords that drive up the cost of broad match campaigns
Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the number of clicks Google reports vs what appears in HitTail's real time report.
Example - David K discusses his experience with HitTail detecting click fraud for his AdWords campaign. Recently, Google reported 6 clicks and HitTail reported only one in the same time period. David verified that the additional clicks were from a Chinese IP address that was sending fraudulent clicks to a geo-targeted campaign for a city in North Carolina. See this forum discussion for more details.
The best part about this is the fact that you can make these observations way before your AdWords or Analytics reports become available. With this data, PPC managers can log in to their AdWords campaigns and make the necessary adjustments, potentially saving money for their client in wasted clicks that could go undetected without the use of HitTail.
For that reason alone, Pay Per Click managers should consider trying HitTail Premium to stay on top of their paid search campaigns in order to make adjustments in real time that could save money in the long run.
One of our most frequently asked questions at HitTail is "What do I do with these HitTail suggestions?". We created an FAQ on this topic but I'd like to create a list of all the different ways actual HitTail customers use their keyword suggestions.
Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.
Create a new blog post using the suggestion as the title / headline
Create new pages or articles on your website targeting the suggested keywords (utilize article writing services such as the Content Spooling Network)
Add the suggested keywords to a Pay Per Click campaign (this is now made easy with HitTail Premium)
Use the keywords on your advertising or landing page
Use the keywords in your email newsletters to your readers or customers
Incorporate the HitTail keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions of existing webpages
Buy a new website domain using HitTail suggestions
Use HitTail keywords to determine product suggestions and stock new products in your eCommerce store
Use keyword suggestions to tag your YouTube videos or del.icio.us bookmarks
We'd love to hear how you use your HitTail keyword suggestions!
So there you have it. I've been dropping hints for a few days now, but HitTail's premium service for driving down CPC has just been launched... and HitTail is entering into the world of AdWords campaign optimization. HitTail is now a PPC product.
Yes, it's true!
But how can that be? HitTail lands firmly on the free and organic side of search engine optimization. Isn't this some sort of betrayal suddenly releasing features designed to encourage you to plow even more money into pay-per-click? Isn't HitTail--the kooky company that always advocated freedom from PPC--reneging on its word?
The answer is No.
This is the creator of HitTail speaking, and after many months of managing AdWords campaigns, I'm here to tell you that HitTail methodology rocks the AdWords world--to the point where you can get a deal on the AdWords side that rivals PPC--and additionally have the satisfaction of managing campaigns that today's SEM companies can hardly even compete with. In my recent experience, I set up a "longtail" campaign in AdWords, and systematically moved the best words into this campaign, knowing that there was already SOME traffic on these words, but we weren't coming up on the first page of results. The idea with AdWords is to get these awesome longtail keywords WORKING FOR YOU RIGHT AWAY without even having to produce organic content for your site.
And it paid off in a big way... a very big way... a big enough way that me--one of the biggest advocates of better search results through blogging--to now also be an AdWords advocate...
...but only conditionally... on the condition of getting one over on AdWords.
What happens if you take the super-charged keyword lists provided by HitTail, where you know traffic is already occuring on your site, but not on page one, then you plug it into AdWords? The answer is you instantly get page on of search results (albeit in an ad) on words where some determined searchers went many pages in. So you suddenly tap into the exponentially greater number of people who never make it past page one, and a significant portion of these people click on ads. With effective keywords in-hand, instead of just moving them to your To-Do list and allowing them to unacceptably age, put them to work for you right away.
And the actual goal here is to lower your overall cost of acquiring customers (audience, visitors, whatever) by eliminating (at least temporarily), the most tedious and unlikely to occur part of HitTailing--namely, creating new website content. Now we still do encourage new website content as your long-term road to PPC freedom. But until you get that content out there, put the super-charged keyword lists to work for you.
There is a need for niche keywords--longtail keywords. Call 'em what you will, but they super-charge both your AdWords campaigns and SEO efforts. Their very nature as obscure but effective make well chosen long tail keywords the best deal in marketing.
For those already into AdWords, think 4% CTR, $0.06 CPC and tons of clicks. For those still only doing SEO, think about reducing the need to continuously expand website content.
That's about to become commonplace, because one of the best kept secrets in natural SEO is about to cross the chasm into mainstream marketing, and AdWords will never be the same.
With just a wee bit of keyword review and approval on your part, your AdWords campaigns will virtually become self-optimizing. We take the competitive intelligence that your site is always trying to give you but which most analytics software ignores (as long-time HitTail fans know well), and feed it directly into your AdWords campaign.
The result is simply amazing, as long-time HitTailer and million-dollar campaign manager Gary Beal has been trying to tell the world for a year. But alas, we are only just starting to teach the world this amazing approach to AdWords campaign management.
The irony here is that its coming from the very same PR firm that helped launch GoTo--later Overture, and today Yahoo! Search Marketing-- the company that taught Google how to make money. Yes, the very same Connors Communications that helped get Amazon off the ground is about to teach everybody how to be low-budget brilliant marketers... by living on the edge of the keyword competition.
The history of HitTail goes back many years, as I began to understand the futility of traditional marketing when dealing with a company that has virtually no budget, a product no one has heard of in a market that hasn't quite developed yet.
That was the story of Scala Multimedia Software in 1998, the company that makes the sort of software that turns plasma and LCD TVs into Minority Report-style digital flatscreen signage. There was no trade-shows at the time, no trade-magazines, and not even a standardized name for the business! It was truly the wild west days of digital signage, where no deployment was over a few dozen screens, because they all had to be updated with landlines. And customers could (and did) come from anywhere in the world. And you had to pay attention to all these geographically dispersed prospects, because you had to aggregate all the customers in the world to turn digital signage into a viable market.
But how do you reach them in the first place?
What sort of marketing campaign could you mount to reach companies in the middle of Malaysia, South America, Africa, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Europe, Japan, United States, Australia, and even Greenland and New Zealand? It's true. Prospects came from all over the world, often getting their first clue from word-of-mouth referrals from Scala's very early days running cable TV "barker channels" on the Commodore Amiga computer platform in the late 80's.
Word of mouth only got you so far.
Enter the Internet, and a radically new update model where the signage could be updated by pulling their own content down from centralized servers. Flat panel technology was also improving, plasma screens becoming forever bigger, and LCDs starting to inch up in size. And the movies--oh the movies! Finaly, I could stop referring to the flying blimp in Blade Runner, and start talking about the ubiquitous electronic advertisements in Minority Report. There was a mainstream movie that allowed the stuff to be understood by the masses.
The time was ripe.
And the rate of people Googling on the subject-matter increased. Oh, there was no telling what people were going to call this emerging industry. A lot of folks felt is was going to be digital signage. But the head of Engineering at the company was betting on dynamic signage, as it was more descriptive. I withheld judgment, and instead wrote about the field is as many ways, and with as many likely word combinations as I could think of. Remember, this was 1999, and Blogger was barely even on the scene. I used my own homespun perfectly-optimized-for-search content management system to spit out page after page of what I at the time called "vignettes". At least one person who knew me back then to this day suggests that I virtually invented what today is called the landing page.
Stories of these landing pages are numerous and colorful. At least one of them directly resulted in hooking up with a major global distribution partner in a market that the company had been hoping to break into for years. It was all predicated by me thinking to roll out some content targeting "plasma display software". I targeted dozens, if not hundreds of different word combinations by this time. Were were all the ideas coming from? What did I know to try? Was it the GoTo keyword suggestion tool (later Overture)? No! It was the company's own log files, which I could view scroll by me in real time, filtering out everything but the highlighted search hits, thanks to my homespun tracking system.
Now, this was not HitTail at the time--far from it. I lacked the critical insights that subsequently went into re-inventing the tracking system for massive scaling (to the world), and automatic evaluation of the keywords, thereby alleviating the most time consuming part--figuring out which terms we STILL HAD TO optimize for.
My title was Webmaster, but really I was a Jack-of-all-trades, tending to almost every aspect of company operations, baring software development of the product itself. So in short, I was finding the prospects and forcing their progress along the sales pipeline in their journey to becoming customers, managed the system that handled taking and shipping orders. It wasn't easy convincing the salespeople at the time that there were real human beings behind these clicks. I developed a whole array of supporting systems that basically took away anyone and everyone's choice to NOT follow up on the sales leads I was generating. It was a brute-force bullying customer relationship management software, which to this day remains as a closely held secret tool of this company, which has withstood several politically motivated attempts to "turn it off".
I go into this level of detail regarding HitTail's history, and how a predecessor to HitTail virtually created an industry, and gathered contact info of all the world's customers in this market to a single company, to explain to you some of the next steps I'll be taking with HitTail feature development.
I'll be constructing a "Lab", a lot like Google Labs, where I'll be experimenting a bit more aggressively with new product features, forever zero'ing in on that "sweet spot" in which analytics software is not even necessary, because we'll keep compelling you to the next necessary action item to close your sales.
I'm a fan of Michael Bosworth's solution selling techniques, which were very necessary for long sales-cycle items such as 1000-screen digital signage deployments, and a fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's total quality management approach, which advocates rapid product improvement based on real-time feedback from your workers and customers. I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Purple Cow (among other books) that says you have to differentiate yourself by being radically and brilliantly different to even stand a chance in today's competitive marketplace, and Guy Kawasaki's pre-Internet/seldom discussed Selling the Dream, in which he plays off his experience launching the Macintosh to teach how to "evangelize" a product and use incredibly clear strategic thinking to do so.
All these principles have gone into HitTail. It's a synthesis of marketing guru books, put together in what I hope is the sort of elegant simplicity, with actual underlying complexity akin to Apple Computer's designs (maybe not in our graphics--yet). But no book has colored our product quite so much as Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, in which he gave a name to the radically simple and effective methodology that was already by this time driving the algorithm behind Connors Communications' proprietary tracking system being used for its public relations customers.
And we saw that the time was right.
Just as with the movie Minority Report made the time right for Scala with digital signage by providing the common cultural awareness (if not the precise language) for this emerging market, Chris' book The Long Tail gave us a way to make HitTail accessible and understandable to the masses.
HitTail's seeming simplicity belies what's actually going on, and we can not count the number of times some know-it-all sysadmin goes "Oh, that's all in your log files" or "It's the same thing as AwStats". What they forget is that we're not providing just another list of top-10 keywords, statistical bullshit. We're skipping over all that keyword research nonsense, and simply telling you what to do next--a huge time saver and advantage in the forever-more-competitive landscape of fighting for first-access to customers online. We're throwing paralysis through analysis in the gutter where it belongs, and looking right at the edge of where you nearly have it going on. Then we tell you how to change your act, ever-so-slightly so you step into the reliable flow of keyword search traffic that you're just around the bend from anyway.
HitTail is not analytics. It's an approach to online marketing pulled right from the minds of some of the best marketing and busines gurus of our time.
But it's the first act.
And after a little time away from HitTail to ensure that the first act is everything we promised (and it is), I'm stepping back onto the scene to plan Act 2.
Quick results in Search Marketing are only possible with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, right? Wrong. The advent of blogging, as well as recent advances to search engine algorithms, has narrowed the gap between PPC and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to mere hours. With PPC, there is instant gratification as your advertisement will appear in search results almost immediately after your campaign is activated. However, this same advantage can now be seen in SEO.
First, let's take a look at some common reasons why SEO projects have not been carried out in the past.
Companies don’t want to abandon tech investments (e.g. content management systems and web publishing tools)
Lack of budget dedicated to SEO
May take a while to demonstrate ROI
Blogging addresses each of these problems.
SEO best practices are already in place
Blogging software by default includes a few basic but important SEO practices by using proper Titles, headlines, URLs, and internal linking structure. Search engines also like sites that have fresh content, which can give blogs great influence over search results.
Recent search engine algorithm changes boost the visibility of blogs
This recent experiment by Ryan Durk took advantage of temporary changes in Google’s logo linking to the search results page for "January 1 TCP/IP". It shows two things: the speed by which a new blog is indexed and the short time between your blog getting indexed and it appearing high in search results.
Blogs are inexpensive and easy to setup
A new blog can be created in a matter of minutes with little technical knowledge. Blog creation is free in many cases, often with a nominal monthly fee for additional features.
Blogging is great for companies that are not ready to make the larger SEO investment or are worried about abandoning a CMS in which they have already invested. Blogging can be used as a proof of concept that shows that SEO can deliver results. Use of blogging software delays the larger discussion of SEO projects that are potentially more time-consuming and require a larger investment that reap longer term benefits. Setting up a blog is inexpensive and doesn’t force you to abandon or modify your existing IT investments.
Then get people to notice your blog.
Conduct Keyword Research
Creating a blog is just the first step. Keyword research can be the difference between a highly popular, authoritative blog and a blog that no one knows exists.
Since everyone competes on the most popular words, try blogging about slightly less competitive topics so your site has the ability to rank for those terms. HitTail can facilitate this process of identifying writing topics that other sites aren’t necessarily targeting, yet will drive traffic.
If you’re just getting started with blogging, write about a subject where you have expertise that you feel will interest your audience. Once you reach a critical mass of blog posts, take a step back and analyze how people are finding your blog and use that information to guide your editorial calendar.
Utilize Social Media and Pinging
In addition to keyword research, it is important to promote the blog using social media tools that increase the visibility of your blog and generate inbound links to your domain. Be sure to utilize pinging services to notify aggregation services of new content on your blog.
Customize the blog template
It is also important to link to your new blog from the Homepage of your main website to make it easier for search engine spiders to discover it. Often times, the default template needs to be tweaked slightly for maximum SEO benefit. For instance, make sure your blog Permalink uses meaningful anchor text and not "www.yourdomain.com/blog/?p=456"
Blogging may not be the long-term solution for fixing a broken site, but it will get your foot in the door for SEO, deliver results in the short term, and facilitate the process of getting buy-in for full-scale, long-term SEO projects for the rest of your website.
Digg Breaking News Stories (And Break Some Of Your Own!) With HitTail
Quite by accident I found an extra use for HitTail that’s pretty killer in terms of generating content for my blog. And I’m going to spill the beans so you can try it for yourself.
Basically, you can use HitTail to discover leads, breaking stories, and gossip.
Yes, gossip!
First, a brief recap on how HitTail works.
You install it on your site and get real-time scrolled keyword results on the searches used to find your site. Then the service points out to you which keywords have the potential to be capitalized by you for best hits on your next post.
So for example, HitTail might point out that somebody used the phrase “green ipod nano” to find your site – even though you didn’t specifically use that phrase in a post. But now you know that there is a relatively untapped interest out there in content on green ipod nanos – and that if you write about them, your hits will increase.
That said, I’m talking about a completely different use for the service. Well, not “completely different” – you’ll still get a lot of hits for your site. It’s just that this service is a whole lot more…edgy. Let me explain what I mean.
While using HitTail last week to monitor my personal niche blog, I notice that the service highlighted a very strange phrase. It was the name of a couple of important people who work in that niche field plus the word “feud.”
Now, as far as I know, those two people, who had a working relationship, were the best of friends. So I thought it odd that someone would have type in their names in relation to a dispute.
So I asked around. And guess what? They did have a recent falling-out.
Now, had I been an Internet gossip columnist, or some hard-core niche reporter – or simply wanted to write a hit-garnering post – this lead on a yet-to-be-discovered story would have been pure gold.
But, just for the pleasure of finding out what hot topics people are typing into search engines AS IT HAPPENS – HitTail is a must for my blogging.
HitTail Gave Me Hot Topics: A Blogger’s Real Story
Hi. I’m a real blogger with a real blog. Here is a personal story about how HitTail worked for me.
I’m always looking for hot topics to blog about. I’m also always on the hunt for the “edge” that will allow me to break stories first. HitTail has given me the tools to do both.
Here is an example of what I mean; this really happened! I blog mostly about comic books and popular culture. Using HitTail, I found out that one of the popular phrases to find my blog was “who will play the Joker in Batman 3?” Now, I never wrote a post about that subject; but somehow the search engine in question found some combination of those words in my blog.
What this result on HitTail told me was that there are readers out there who are interested in this topic. Now I have a great story idea with a confirmed potential audience!
HitTail even has a “to do” feature that lets me move the phrase or words in question to a separate page for easy reference. So when the well is dry and I’m jonesing for ideas, I can take a look at my HitTail to-do list.
Next time, I will reveal an even GREATER secret about using HitTail for your blogging needs – how to not only find hot topics, but actual story “leads” to investigate further. I really got the edge using this – you can too.
Have you jumped on the Facebook bandwagon? Meet other HitTail fans by becoming a fan of HitTail yourself. If it becomes popular, maybe we'll even start a group.
As part of our major HitTail promotion, TechCrunch edited by Michael Arrington, is now displaying the HitTail Live widget. TechCrunch is a prestigious blog source for all things going on in the tech word from internet product reviews to company profiles, and visitors can now see exactly what keywords are bringing people to the site.
Check out this screen shot illustrating how traffic was driven to the TechCrunch site when people searched on the popular terms "Microsoft," "iPod," and "iPhone." These are competitive search terms, so it's no small feet that TechCrunch was able to pull in that traffic.
HitTail issues suggestions for what to write about to drive more traffic to your site, which no other web analytics tool does!
One of the first sites to catch onto how important our SEO flowchart is, is Indonesian. I'm certainly glad I'm reaching Indonesia, but I am somewhat disappointed that no English-speaking websites have picked up on this yet. I think this chart will trigger off the HitTail marketing revolution because of how it brings down lofty longtail concepts to a route procedure,
I've been linking to the most-critical diagram from just about every page of the HitTail site, trying to get folks to understand the essence of what HitTailing is. I apparently haven't been doing such a great job, and would be appreciative of any ideas on how me might get the message out more. We're getting an affiliate program together that will be based around high-volume sites, so anyone willing to partake, please contact me. Anyone with low-volume sites who would like to eventually participate, just follow out the procedure on the diagram, and contact us when you've built up your traffic!
I have to bring this HitTail review to your attention. It strikes many chords with me.
First, it documents the experience of installing and getting started with HitTail, and the discoveries of where your traffic is really coming from (keyword-wise). Most people just don't get that most traffic comes from the collection of small, incidental word-combo's, which you never targeted, but somehow are still being found on. Added together, it almost always out-performs your top keywords, so keeping the content-engine churning is well worth it.
Second, it's from "A Tale of 2 WAHMs", which is totally encouraging to me. For those not familiar with that acronym, it stands for "work at home moms". I share with Connors Communications (my employer), the general feeling that we're changing the world with HitTail. And while what we're doing isn't exactly like manufacturing 90% efficient solar cells (which will change the world), as an evolving public relations firm (more on that soon), we CAN make a positive impact on peoples' lives. Specifically in this case, we can help to enable a workforce whose composition is exactly analogous to the long tail effect that makes HitTail work.
Think about it.
You've got work at home mom's around the world, carving out businesses for themselves based on eBay, Google Checkout, or a host of other eCommerce systems. Individually, they are each a small business. But collectively, I speculate that it's a work force as large as the largest companies.
Now, I'm not advocating that they band together and start a single company. But I am advocating bolstering marketing capabilities within a portion of the economy where budget's don't exist for TV and newspaper advertisements, and barely even for targeted marketing like AdWords. Unfortunately, they don't have anything like co-op marketing budgets. But fortunately, all you really need these days is something worthwhile to say related to your product or service.
And we provide a megaphone.
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
Well, I’m really HitTailing away, and it’s time to talk about blog management. What is the correct ratio between blogging purely about what’s on your mind and in your heart, versus about what you KNOW FOR SURE will generate new traffic and audience to your site? (ala HitTailing)
Is blogging primarily a function to generate traffic (SEO) for some other ultimate purpose at your website (driving sales), or it is a “pure” medium for pontification and soapbox journalism? What if you’re a business and have to balance blogging with all your other corporate considerations?
Quite a dilemma.
A little over a year since HitTail’s inception, we’ve built up our own website, practicing what we preach to a certain extent. As you pursue over my blogging topic headlines, you’ll see that for the most part, I blogged about what I wanted to, and rarely gave a second thought to optimizing my headlines.
But we’re going into promotion mode, and as you can see, virtually every time we HitTail, it works. We’re rapidly becoming one of our own best case studies. We can decide WHAT type of traffic we want, and with little more effort than putting a little article like this, we add 10 to 50 more hits a day to our website, of the most qualified sort.
10 to 50 hits sounds like nothing, right?
But think of yourself at a conference. You’re not a speaker, yet you’re trying to do some business networking. Would you consider yourself lucky if you could hand out your business card to 10 to 50 people every day? How about if those people were actually not at random, and somehow knew to seek you out with some public addressing system?
Pretty good, huh?
Now what if on every day of the conference, you could get someone else to hand out business cards on your behalf, to uniquely pre-qualified prospects? And with each subsequent day, you could add yet another networking employee, and pay them no salary, and never lose your prior people? Until eventually, you have an army handing out cards. Well, that’s the essence of intelligent longtail keyword marketing. It’s cumulative in nature, until you reach the point of diminishing returns, which doesn’t really occur until you’ve saturated a market, written about everything there is to write about in that field, and have reached every person whose ever been in the market. This probably won’t happen to most people until they’re ready to retire. And if you do “reach the end” of your HitTailing activity within one industry or market, you simply attack new markets.
But how does a blogging content expansion strategy dove-tail with your regular website?
First of all, blogging is essentially no different than normal Web publishing. There are plenty of websites that use blogging software as their PRIMARY publishing platform, dispensing with the heavy-duty enterprise platforms, like Vignette or Documentum. Web publishing is Web publishing. Don’t let the enterprise elitists intimidate you. Blogger, TypePad, SquareSpace and WordPress can all be used to manage the blog portion of your existing website, or replace many CMS systems altogether (especially SquareSpace). And more mainstream open source CMS systems like Drupal and Joomla are becoming more blog-like all the time, displaying the search engine-friendly artifacts that litter blogging software.
So no matter your existing website, you can just arbitrarily make a new subdirectory or subdomain, and say “this portion of the website shall be maintained with blogging software!”
It’s a relatively easy matter to match a new blog to the look of your existing website, then start creating new content. This is where HitTailing really comes in, to get the most out of your blog—because it’s time to build audience. But you don’t want just any audience. You want the RIGHT audience.
So, get about 100 initial blog posts out there to stimulate and kick-off the HitTailing procedure. Our own website only existed since June of 2006. But today, we have over 1,360 known pages in our site (search in Google on site:hittail.com), and most of that is generated by blogging software. We’ve seized the top positions on lucrative terms all across the longtail marketing space. We’re gaining the reputation of one of the top keyword tools in the industry. This has been a combination of writing about what we KNOW we want to write about, and writing about what we DISCOVERED that we needed to write about. Both are important. But the later (use of our own product) is what’s resulting in our natural search growth, and continual acquisition of new HitTail users.
The HitTailing process was created precisely for this sort of blog management. There must be a balance struck between what your instincts tell you what to write about…
…and what tools like HitTail tell you to write about.
…and somehow, it almost magically seems to work out. Because isn’t “blog management” a perfect topic for us?
HitTail is all about generating traffic online, of the best sort: qualified visitors. We've been extolling HitTail's ability to do this for over a year. But from time to time, it's nice for us to demonstrate how it works. This video was produced as a demonstration of the use of the HitTail product itself, and results it has produced after several months.
So not all new writing topics come directly from HitTail suggestions. Sometimes, it's much more indirect, but still HitTail-related. For example, because you see ALL referral links in real-time, you can see that a discussion has been created about you in a forum MOMENTS after it's been created. You don't rely on Technorati, Google search or anything else--except for the fact that someone followed a link to your site, and HitTail noticed.
Using this technique, I discovered the MommysHelperCommunity.com. Now imagine for a moment what it would take to discover this link otherwise. It MAY have shown up in analytics software if you looked precisely the right location. You MAY have it brought to your attention within some amount of days of the post occurring.
But with HitTail, I knew INSTANTANEOUSLY! I followed the link back, and I saw the discussion just as it was being born. Basically, the moment the author tests the link--you know!
You might wonder why I didn't step in and start posting there immediately.
Well, this is a great example of how I like unbiased discussion to start first. I'm truly curious to see what people have to say before I go predisposing them. Of course, after a little while I step in, which shows them both that I care about their site (always a big boost to them), and that I'm there to answer questions.
In this way, the entire online world becomes my forum. I don't care where I answer. In one case, I'm in a discussion with a bunch of lovely ladies known as PSO's (phone sex operators). I'm tied in with the work-a-home-moms WAHMs community now through several different links. The level of trust is so unbelievably high, that when the forums are private, I'm regularly granted complementary guest logins so I can go and answer questions.
THIS is precisely where most other PR firms who are doing the online thing trip up. They never know a product with such intimacy that they can represent it as a living online embodiment of the company and the product. In my case, as the creator of HitTail, and an online social butterfly, I find it second nature. And this is the attitude I imbue into my team of online outreach folks here at Connors Communications.
While we can't churn out clones of the product-creators to do with other companies what Connors does with HitTail, what we CAN do is the closes thing possible.
We use HitTail to really get into the mind of the Client's potential audience. We get to know the company's founder or product-creator, so we can think like them, and eventually speak in their voice. We get to learn the ins-and-outs of the product, and get under the company's hood. Why do they like it? Why do they hate it?
And by engaging in such practices and surfing back through the referrers (and this is how the article comes full-circle), we know the unknowable. That is, we know what would be unknowable to ANY OTHER PR firm in NYC. This is something we've done regularly for clients for years.
And now that we've extracted HitTail from our high-end SEO offerings, it's time I started teaching the HitTailing audience OTHER ways to use the real-time flow of data that HitTail provides.
This is one.
Don't ALWAYS follow suggestions. Sometimes write for a specific new audience that you just discovered, like the WAHMs (work at home mom's).
Know EVERY discussion that's taking place about you, your products or your company--even when it never showed up in Blog Search or Google Alerts.
Google Analytics and HitTail often mentioned together
It's more than a year since we launched the HitTail Beta (August 14th--I should have done a happy-beta-birthday), and some of you have been with us since we soft-launched it in the form of MyLongTail at the beginning of 2006, where I documented the fact that's important to HitTail--you can get into Google search results with a brand-new website in under 2 weeks! The "sandbox" penalty was gone. So, imagine what you could do with a site that was already somewhat built up! Imagine what you could do if you knew the terms that were teetering on the edge of working for you already in natural search, and just required a little push.
Well, you just imagined HitTail, and I'm happy to have brought it to so many people for over a year now.
I'm always still surprised and delighted at the articles that keep appearing about HitTail in blogs and newsletters. Here's one that apparently has been out since May of this year from Yaro Starak, the Blog Traffic King, but I only just discovered. It sums up the whole long tail and HitTail thing very nicely, and for those of you who don't get it yet, it's a recommended read. Thanks, Yaro!
The feedback really just keeps pouring in, and I'm surprised by how across-the-board it's coming from. You can read a great deal of the feedback on our TypePad Quotes and Testimonials site. But there are even not-safe-for-work links that I'm avoiding putting there out of good taste. But never one to avoid controversy, I figured I'd share one not-safe-for-work link (NSFW) regarding funny suggestions from HitTail. There are more. Seems we're just as appealing to the adult entertainment industry as political blogs, eCommerce sites and the like.
I guess this makes us an equal opportunity secret weapon for driving website traffic. I'm even waiting for candidates from the 2008 election to start hopping on the HitTail bandwagon as part of getting their message out online. There was brief interest from Obama Girl, but I guess she's so busy with her newfound fame. I'll give her another try.
One of the amazing trends I've discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.
While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence--working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the "My HitTail" tab was only one of five--and actually the least-important one at that.
That's right!
We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you're already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!
The fact that we're not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We're not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We're merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It's not some derivative of this event that's important. It's the event itself--that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you--usually deep in the results.
This tells you two things:
You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL--like surveying for new oil fields.
There's a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.
So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you're simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic "oil", and you're verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There's no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don't have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail's writing suggestions.
It's that easy.
So, we don't ask you to give up Google Analytics. It does a bunch of things HitTail is unlikely to ever do. But because our philosophy is so radically opposite to statistics (anecdotal evidence), they compliment each other perfectly--and this is perhaps the reason so many people mention GA and HitTail in the same breath.
If you have to choose just one more tracking system to run in addition to Google Analytics, HitTail is it.
There are a number of HitTail videos starting to accumulate, and I figured it was time to put them all on one page--at least in the blog. It should give a nice overview of the online marketing shift that's taking place, centered around HitTail. Enjoy!
We made this video for Bambi Francisco on MarketWatch, but when it was never used, we just started using it on our own. It's yet another explanation of how HitTail works.
And finally, with all these great SEO capabilities, that we're regularly told are years ahead of the competition, we decided to start a New York Search Engine Optimization Superpowers Meetup. Here's some video shot by my friend, Marshall Sponder, the WebMetricsGuru!
Here is one more video, which I added on August 24th. I forgot this NYTech Meetup video was available. It's not one we produced, but HitTail got a big round of applause, and it certainly belongs on this list.
Here is another video, which we just produced yesterday (August 23, 2007). It's the long-awaited video of precisely how to use HitTail. Looks like we'll have to produce a dedicated video page soon, and stop using this blog page.
So, these are a few words about our high-end product, and the history of HitTail. As many know, HitTail is the brainchild of the public relations firm, Connors Communications, founded by Connie Connors, one of the folks who helped build-up some of the Dot Com giants, such as Amazon.com and Priceline.
Unlike other PR firms who have entered the online space, in a possibly overzealous fashion, and perhaps even risked their reputation with kitschy, manipulative stunts, such as disingenuous blogging, Connors has chosen a path less traveled, but we think infinitely more rewarding. We have actually become one of the new generation of disruptive, game-changing companies that we endeavor to promote online. In other words, we don't only talk the talk, but we walk the walk.
We created HitTail.
So, what do we do with this incredible audience we're accumulating, as we become highly recognized in marketing circles around the world? Why, we use it to win you as our next client, of course. Our brand of SEO is very high-end, really only making sense for folks who already have $100K AdWords campaigns, but would like their natural search piece of the pie.
How does this relate to HitTail?
As more and more HitTailers are coming to discover, this beloved Web 2.0 long tail writing topic suggestion tool is actually an "extraction" from our larger product, which Connors has been using with high-end client engagements for some years now—where budgets of $100K/mo are traditionally being poured into AdWords, and they're looking for a more sensible approach.
And now we're ready to describe this previously tightly-guarded secret to the world.
We named it Connors ABCs.
Why ABCs? We think it describes how we view ourselves as the new fundamental building blocks of a new form of online marketing—where you fix your website, without scrapping and rebuilding everything you've got. Yes, it's SEO (search engine optimization), but brought to a whole new level, through a non-intrusive presentation layer that lets us remix websites like DJs remix music.
We describe this complex system of re-working and re-publishing data you already have so often, that it wore us down.
Hopefully using this demo, the enthusiasm that starts to build once we start to talk with you can become infectious, and you can pass the word along in your company. But fair warning! As Mike Crowl stated in his review of our presentation:
It assumes that you’re intelligent and can keep up with both audio and visual input at the same time, so that while your ear is listening to one part of the message your eye is either getting an alternative picture of that message or something additional.
So even if you don't have a budget of $25,000/mo to spend, Mike Crowl suggests that you check out the demo, because:
I haven’t seen one as slick and mind-catching in a while.
Here's an article that echoes many of HitTail's sentiments about how to write well AND bring in he most qualified visitors through search. Anyone who is not totally familiar with the subtly different brand of SEO that HitTail advocates should check out this article on the lost art of writing well.
A Meetup Invitation, a Connors Client Slot, and a Link-Back
Anyone who is in the New York area tonight is welcome to stop by they Prey bar for the SEO Superpowers Meetup, and say hello to the HitTail and Connors Communications crew.
A few other items I want to get out there in this post: Connors Communications, the company that created HitTail, and played a fundamental role in kick-starting the commercial Internet, has a few slots opening up in its SEO and PR schedule. Usually, engagements start at no less than $25K/mo. I thought I'd mention it on the HitTail blog, since this is where much of our audience currently resides. So if you know of someone with a large AdWords budget, looking to diversify and free themselves from the Google Tax Man, then drop us a line or corner me at Prey.
Also, for anyone who hasn't noticed yet, almost any reference you make to HitTail in your blog post will usually score you a mention and a link-back in our TypePad collection of quotes and testmonials. So, if you've been waiting to say a few nice words about us, now seems like a good time.
And finally, I'm really pushing to get people to sign up for at least the Plus service, just as a way of supporting us. It's only $99.95 per year, and think how much time we're saving you struggling with those other analytics packages that ask you to jump through hoops before you figure out what to do with your data. As our quote page shows, we're rapidly becoming an integral part of many peoples' day-to-day marketing activities, and the surest way to a long-term relationship is throwing a little support our way!
If you find HitTail useful, then I’m officially asking for the sale. Please consider supporting us by upgrading your account to Plus.
What I’m doing is proving to my co-workers that in this Web 2.0 world we live in, where it seems so much is free, that paying is a way of deliberately supporting those you like. For a moment, forget about the enhanced features you get with the upgrade. Think about us like musicians who have decided to put all our music on MP3, since it’s going to be there anyway, and ask you to support us through attending concerts, and buying the occasional CD to throw some support our way, and keep us doing what we do.
This post may end up a bit controversial, since we seen to be endorsing the business model for the music industry that the RIAA is avoiding like the plague. But supporting artists, businesses, and software you like is going to be a lot more like voting with your credit card than it is actually buying tangible products.
We appreciate every bit of support we get, and I’m making this post as a way of seeing what “just asking” can do for us. The alternatives are things like an NPR fund-raiser, where I make more intrusive and repeated requests. We’re avoiding cutting back any of the goodness of our fully-featured free service. But you can feel good by doing your part, and simply upgrading one of your accounts to Plus.
I can’t offer much by way of promotion, but how about this: anyone who signs up and puts “friend of mike” in the promotion code field, I will send you an invite to join my FaceBook network. You’ll see my status updates on the FaceBook news feed, and will have a special line to me.
I’m also thinking about buying a bunch of those $1 graphics, if I can create an “I Support HitTail” badge. If I can figure out how that works, I’ll officially gift everyone who comes in with that promotion code and the Plus service with a cool badge to demonstrate to everyone that you support us.
Well, we just fixed the biggest criticism of HitTail. Those of you who follow this blog can check it out by simply visiting your "My Account" page.
No, we haven't made any change to our unique filtering system that often confuses people. We stick by it.
Nor is our biggest criticism the controversy we've triggered off in the SEO community. They'll eventually understand long tail data mining.
And no, the biggest criticism isn't even the original point made by John Battelle about how taking HitTail writing suggestions in pursuit of better natural search listings may be somewhat... inorganic.
No, the biggest criticism leveled against HitTail is how people want multiple websites per login.
You all want more HitTail! You want it to be easier to sign up the first account, then add site after site after site. Well, we heard you. And now you have "My Sites" on your "My Account" page. All free HitTail users can rapidly add up to 4 more sites (5 total) to each account. So now for all you HitTailers managing multiple accounts, it's a breeze.
What about the 6th site, you ask?
You always can create a new account, and do 5 more free sites. Free use of HitTail is still effectively unlimited.
But, if you're such an avid HitTailer and fan of our service, why not upgrade one of your sites to the Plus service, and support us? Not only do we greatly appreciate it, but then there's no limit to the number of sites you can add under a single account.
