While some discouraging stats about the use of Google+ have emerged in recent days, there’s no reason to give up the ghost just yet — particularly with the recent introduction of G+ business pages. If you’re hesitating to jump into the pool and establish your business on G+, linger no longer — Inc.com’s Abram Brown is here to give you the skinny on why getting in early is a smart move for small businesses and mega-corporations alike.

Content Marketing Essentials: Tactical Advice From A To Z — Search Engine Land

For those of you who just don’t know where to start making your web content sparkle, this 26-tidbit-long list provides a fantastic resource for your publication, website, blog or newsfeed. Content is king, they say — so go check out this list and don’t let yours languish for another minute!

Places Reviews: Getting Offline Online — Search Engine Guide

With the recent shakeups to Google Place Pages and the diminishment of third-party reviews, making sure the online word of mouth about your business is positive is more important than ever — particularly when it comes to Google reviews. Since these pieces function as both a ranking factor and a critical metric, spurring viewers to click through to your site, it’s important to make sure they’re in top-notch shape so you can present the best face to the public. This article offers handy tips on encouraging reviews with a handily-placed and easily generatable QR code.

How percolation time can make you a better writer — SuccessWorks

With the breakneck speed of contemporary society, it can be hard to find a few moments to meditate on the details of your day. The simple act of reflection can be enormously beneficial both personally and with regard to work. Here, SucessWorks’ Heather Lloyd-Martin shares some of the transformative powers of “percolation time,” particularly when applied to your writing projects and beyond.

5 Ways to Give Your Content Marketing New Life — TopRank Blog

Creative content can be a tricky beast, demanding immense amounts of time, energy and skill on the part of its creator to really jump off the page when read. This step-by-step guide from Heidi Cohen, President of Riverside Marketing Strategies, is invaluable for those of us whose websites’ content just don’t seem to be quite dazzling enough. Read on to learn about targeting your audience, respecting the reader and staying relevant in a fast-paced sphere of business.

Are we not men?

The new kid on the block has opened itself to businesses in two principal ways. Unlike Facebook, which focuses on admin-managed pages, and Twitter, which couldn’t care less if a person, place, or animal is represented in a feed, Google initially maintained its focus on people in its business-level implementation of its social network, not announcing any kind of branded pages. Then Monday’s announcement of Facebook-style business pages opened a new avenue for marketers, if only those in selected niches. Both new tools allow for the implementation of the “authority” metrics hinted at in numerous Google quality documents.

But should a business even have a Google+ presence? Facebook of course is ubiquitous, and Twitter has proven itself to be a direct customer relations tool. Google+, however, has languished as Robert Scoble’s main soapbox and Android users’ photo repository. Google+ isn’t a lead generator, lacking the customization of Facebook tabs, and it isn’t a customer service tool, lacking the plurality userbase (8% of the US) Twitter enjoys.

Applications of Google+ for Business

But it’s not just those on the social network who will benefit from business applications of Google+. Integration with search and the use of the network as an authority metric seem to be major advantages of Google+ for businesses. Once set up correctly, a robust Google+ profile can give authority to local ranking and regular integrated SERP rank depending on page type. Unsurprisingly, this leaves the active maintenance lacking; however, even that aspect can be worthwhile in the right niches.

Internally, Hangouts combined with Google Docs allows decentralized businesses a face-to-face online collaboration tool. Users can avoid the loss of communication from short text comments in edits, enriching group writing and design. This use of Docs can help a variety of businesses, both for internal meetings and for work with clients. The possibilities previously hinted at are relatively endless, and make Google+ a must-have for remote businesses, some design firms, and any company needing to build something in front of a customer or each other without being in the same room.

But most companies don’t need that kind of ability for real-time document editing. For them, Hangouts provide a simple way to start webinars, live shows, and other almost TV-styled content. Something like SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday could be live broadcast with question-and-answer, recorded locally, and quickly uploaded to YouTube or another video site, then added to a website for further life out of the content. If live videos would take too much effort, even a simple video exclusive to Google+ can help drive uses both to your Plus Page and create user interaction. This kind of direct, personal, and instant communication with users and the ease of creating something for all visitors is nearly unprecedented in social media.

How Your Employees

Keeping with the focus on both users and non-users of the network, Google+ offers ways to interact with customers outside of the realm of the social network — being the only outlet for rel=”author” and introducing rel=”publisher”, the best way to get your personal face and name ad your company’s image in the SERPs. Reinforcing the authority metrics hinted at in Panda and the related effects, Google+ is the gatekeeper for bridging the gap between semantic and visible authorship in the SERPs, and the exposure and connection of a face and name to a business can humanize and connect with customers in a way that couldn’t be done for someone who isn’t just signed into Facebook. “The face in the SERPs” is perfect for any company with a regularly maintained blog or article section. Similarly, a company might see its logo next to its web site when rel=”publisher” is implemented.

Using Google+ to Put Your Face in the SERPs

Happily, WordPress sites have a relatively simple solution for implementing a multi-person rel=”author”. It does the first step for you, linking to the author page with rel=”author”. Then, add your canonical Plus account url to the Website field in Your Profile under Users:

Place your canonical Google+ url in this field under User > Your profile

Then, you need to edit the theme, adding this to the body of either your main template, or the author template, author.php, omitting the if-statement:

<?php if (is_author()) {
$curauth = (isset($_GET['author_name'])) ? get_user_by('slug', $author_name) :
get_userdata(intval($author));
?>
<a rel="me" href="<?php echo $curauth->user_url; ?>">
Visit me on Google+
</a>
<?php } ?>

This will get the author name if it’s set, then get all of the user data, then display the url from that author in a link with the all-important rel=”me”.

Oops! Not what you'd like to see...

Similarly, to set up rel=”publisher”, just a link tag on all pages without rel=”author” on it will connect your site with your company Google+ Page. Why only on those pages? Because as Search Engine Land’s rich snippet test shows, Google will prioritize author over publisher.

<?php if (!is_single()) { ?>
<link href="https://plus.google.com/113323125805722144061/" rel="publisher" />
<?php } ?>

Once it’s all set up, check your url in that same Rich Snippet Tester tool, making sure it shows your face and name. The wait time on recognition from Google is inconsistent, but such connections are key to establishing authority.

Google+ Establishes Thought Leaders

A secondary effect of individual commercial Google+ profiles is that giving a face to a URL can create a sense of thought leadership, pulling in longer-term researchers with high quality informative articles and blogs. Having one author connected to your name will heavily associate the one person with the site; having multiple writers will strengthen the authority of each writer as an individual source of quality knowledge. A logo, if well-chosen, transforms the SERPs into display ads. Through either, one positions their employees as experts and their company as prominent: certainly an admirable position.

Google+ might not be for every business, even businesses that rely on their current Apps as the underpinning for their online productivity. However, for businesses with the specific needs for which Google+ provides killer apps, Google+ is a perfect addition to the social media profile of your business. Furthermore, it’s ease of setup provides deep support beyond social interaction, leaving much utility even for more straightforward businesses.

…And hey, maybe one of your employees can criticize you while still garnering support for the company in a precarious time…

Image Courtesy Cambodia4KidsOrg.

After Google’s big “Freshness update” was announced yesterday, the SEO world has been in quite a tizzy. But for those of us who aren’t technically-minded, what does this update actually entail? Justin Briggs, an SEO expert and Big Fish Games marketing champion, gives us this exhaustive set of data analyses to come up with a comprehensive guide to link freshness, including handy data on how to think critically about your site’s “Freshrank.”

How to Properly Use Facebook’s Advertising Features — ProNet Advertising

Targeted Facebook ads are a bread-and-butter item of the SEO community, with FB’s enormous user base offering a nearly unlimited source of demographic information and marketing potential. However, they’re not without flaws; in order to maximize your ads’ potential, you’ll need to put some research into the best practices and what you can do to make sure that targeting translates to eyeballs and clicks. Sonia Tracy of PsPrint offers up these five basic tips that will get you on the road to a well-maintained, efficient Facebook ad campaign.

Euclid Offers “Google Analytics For The Real World” — Search Engine Land

Now here’s an idea: Euclid Elements, a brand-new startup from some of the innovators behind Google Analytics, promises to create an Analytics-like experience — for brick and mortar locations. Through the installation of small sensors in-store, Euclid can help business owners track repeat shoppers, identify consumer patterns, and gauge seemingly subjective metrics such as foot traffic appeal and customer loyalty. As SEL notes, this isn’t an entirely new concept, but Euclid is certainly the first service of its type to apply an Analytics-like sophistication to this kind of metric tracking, and can potentially be invaluable to savvy small business owners who want to “optimize” their physical location.

Which Brain Is Your Website Selling To? — ClickZ

A fascinating look at Internet marketing from an evolutionary psychology standpoint. ClickZ’s Tim Ash evaluates the different aspects of what goes on in your brain when you look at a webpage, and offers some tips on what you can do to make sure your site hits all the marks to be effective!

250,000 Ninjas Chop Fruit Every 60 seconds on Mobile [Infographic] — Social Times

Did you know that over 23k apps are downloaded every minute? The mobile world is expanding at an alarming rate, and Mobclix is here to give you the scoop on the pings, taps, requests and, yes, even tiny ninjas that are whizzing around us every second of the day. The numbers are impressive — I don’t know about you, but I’m rethinking giving up that Angry Birds habit.

That's some brand love.

A few weeks ago, Facebook Marketing Solutions, the advertising side of the social media giant, released its new education portal for small businesses just starting out online, titled Facebook for Business.

The Facebook page for the group is nothing more than a simple sales pitch for businesses becoming involved on the site. It’s tips for publishing, appeals to outmoded user statistics, and overall tone is clearly directed at the first-time Facebook advertisers. Promoting Sponsored Stories seems to be the main goal, though the ability for a small business to achieve such a close relationship with the company behind the site is not clear at first glance: Nike, American Express, and a page that can get 100 answers to the question “Blue or purple?” are featured, but no one just starting out with limited brand awareness. However, as you delve deeper into the videos, a number of case studies can be heard by the part-time Internet marketer to help understand the basics of the varied services Facebook offers, explained in a way that focuses on what makes social media advertising different from traditional venues.

But July 27th brought a new arena for the first-time marketer. The Facebook for Business site offers a set of introductory slides more like what one would expect on the Facebook page. The Best Practice Guide and other tips take the unedited rambling of the taped live webinars from the Facebook page and put them into clear slideshows (though inexplicably as unsharable and minimally-graphable PDFs). Discussing Pages, Ads, Sponsored Stories, and the “Platform,” Facebook lays out its basic services in an all-too-simple way.

The site is clearly for someone who doesn’t muck with websites, as just one tab describing the Open Graph protocol for a new marketer would show a whole new world, integrating on-site tagging with a need to contact a Preferred Developer to best take advantage of the depth of information one can provide, shape, and offer to their clients.

It’s easy, at least for the somewhat experienced marketer, to come up with counterexamples, glossed-over topics that are the core of Facebook advertising such as effective demographic targeting, and the just-seething disdain for squares who just haven’t gotten how cool Social Media is. But I applaud Facebook for their efforts; the only other major social media outlet for business is Twitter, which starts its Promoted links at $5,000 per month and provides little information for its non-paid business partners. Google+ recently purged business accounts, asking creators of those accounts to “hold off,” and have been “focusing on the consumer experience” — words that are hardly music to marketers’ ears.

What the shortcomings of the Facebook for Business and Facebook Marketing Solutions pages really show off is that a business needs dedicated social media management, whether through an SEO firm or internally. The waters are murky and best handled by someone who knows not just the sales pitch for getting involved, but also the mechanics of the process and what little stuff can greatly improve the social footprint of the small business. It’s too hard to sum up everything that should and could be done to optimally advertise using social media just on a few webpages or through a few taped webinars — the best thing is to call Ghostbusters and let Peter and Ray and Egon worry about the ghosts so business owners can get back to directly helping their customers.

For example, we are currently working with a Playa del Carmen hotels client that is interested in ramping-up their local presence. This isn’t the easiest task but it certainly isn’t impossible. A few Mexico-focused business directories will need to be sourced, Google translator will be used like it is going out of style and a Mexican-formatted Google Places listing will need to be created. Again, not simple but all in a day’s work around here.

The most important thing to keep in mind when it comes to local SEO is that it is a newer industry and is constantly changing. This means that there can be quite a few kinks in the technology. Google is no exception to this.

After creating the client’s Google Places listing, we had the misfortune of discovering that the wrong country code was added to the listing. Typically, this would be a setback that would require another round of verification for the listing but not a deal breaker. Unfortunately, this was not a typical case. The country code had not been added incorrectly by us, but by Google and our client wasn’t the only one that was affected by this.

After some research, we discovered that listings in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico are using the USA country code (01) rather than Mexico’s country code (52) in the main search engine results page. However, the correct country code is used on the actual Place page. This is a pretty significant bug in Google Places but is par for the course in local SEO. Surely, the issue will eventually be resolved but for the time being it seems like there are going to be quite a few Mexican businesses with silent phone lines.

MonitorThis is a free service that collates results from 25 different global web resources into a single digest-style RSS feed. This list includes an impressive array of social media (from small-scale blog-focused projects such as blogdigger to the behemoth of Twitter), news aggregators like Google and Yahoo News, and sharing/discovery engines like Metacafe and del.icio.us. Interestingly enough, Bing is also included in the sites aggregated– with its recent decision to start weighing Facebook likes into its SERP rankings, you’re getting a double whammy of meta-social search. The service observes results from all of these sources, updating its feed instantly so you can see your chosen keyword’s mention as soon as it’s indexed by the various engines’ spiders.

It’s unfeasible to track down every blog venue, review directory, social networking site and even article engine that may make mention of your brand or business, MonitorThis makes it easy to stay on top of every aspect of your online appearance. Simply import the OPML file into your favorite RSS reader and rest easy knowing you’ve got a watchful eye on your name and reputation.

Just Semantics

Semantic web design is nothing new to the SEO community. We know the difference between span style=font-size:30px and an H1 tag or strong and b, and we’re clear that Google and other spiders read the two tags differently. But with microformats, the intent is not to (necessarily) change the presentation along with the meaning, as most HTML tags do, but it integrate metadata for spiders and other programs.

Three microformats are clearly worthwhile for the search marketing community: rel=nofollow, hCard, and hReview. There are other microformats that are for events, syndication, or denoting a more personal relationship between people, but these are of particular, niche uses. Most microformats can be tested using the Google Rich Snippet Tester, which will also alert you to some of Google’s peculiarities about microformats.

rel=“nofollow”

Nofollow is an “elemental microformat,” one that is a “minimal solution to a single problem,” that is pervasive throughout the web thanks to Google’s endorsement from 2005. Every blog owner knows about nofollow. It’s the key to making comment spam not hurt your site. Put simply, making a link be nofollow-ed keeps your “link juice” from reaching that site, effectively taking away your endorsement of the link.

While it was a common practice to “sculpt” your link profile using nofollow, 2009 brought about an announcement from none other than SEO dominatrix Matt Cutts, changing how nofollow is treated, effectively eliminating sculpting as a highly effective technique.

Nevertheless, nofollow is a necessary part of any comment or signature system.

hCard 1.0

“hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard … properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML.” Uhhh… What?

vCard is the electronic equivalent of a business card, saved in a .vcf file. It’s a file you send or have for download that includes information like name, company, telephone, or even logo and photo. hCard puts that kind of functionality onto a website using a “compound microformat,” allowing spiders and even some browsers to parse out the information.

hCards can be downloaded directly to a vCard using bookmarklets, on-page links or browser plugins for Safari, Firefox, Chrome, or IE. This could be the new way to give someone you’re meeting for the first time your card.

hReview 0.3

hReview is similar to hCard, described as “a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.” hReview works in the same way as hCard, using classes to mark text as metadata. However, fields in hReview can be hidden for better presentation, using a class of “value-title” and putting the content in a title attribute.

hReview isn’t as immediately applicable as hCard, though it can connect reviews with a places page. We’re currently testing how best to do this, and what it really takes to make that connection — let us know if you’ve found anything!

Web 3.0

Is this really the next step in the Internet’s evolution? Certainly, the term Web 2.0 has been bandied about, referring to the social sphere, where everyone networks with and talks to random people, trying to raise awareness of their pet ideas and projects. But with the “death” of the first round of social networks like Friendster and MySpace, and the utter ubiquity of others like Twitter and Facebook, could the web be going through its next iteration by making every page be “semantic” to better provide meta-information?

Well, the social web was just the effective monetization of old ideas like BBSes, forums, and chatrooms; similarly, the semantic web is just further specializing the strides in separating presentation from content that began with the deprecation of the <font> tag with the rise of CSS.

Are microformats the future of the web? Are you using them right now?

Flash forward to now — I’ve had a whopping year of intensive exposure and training in Internet Marketing: found out what Facebook is really for; why Google might not even find the site I’m looking for; what Google is doing in my status bar, even if I typed in the url; how Google’s ads knew exactly what I typed; that Google’s rankings are always in a state of flux; and even how I like to see the pages I visit. In short, entering this job totally changed how I look at the web.

And I’m happier for it. Sure, people are always trying to create some kind of “Google is Watching You” zeitgeist, whether through their use of AdBlock and Ghostery, or by bringing up the problems Google’s had with European trade officials, or how much Google’s search results have changed since the last time they noticed. People seem to be concerned that someone’s watching their online habits specifically. But I’m now the person who’s watching, and I know how and why I’m doing it.

Is this who's looking at your browsing habits?

To be fair, everyone who’s “invading” privacy is watching online habits. It’s easy to say it’s on a “macro” level, but it’s harder to convince some people that it’s more like an ant farm than an investigation. For internet marketers, not only is it simply not profitable to look at the individual, but it’s becoming less feasible and less legal to do so.

Firstly, targeted marketing based on internet behavior isn’t an unregulated free-for-all on your personal information. 2009 brought a proposal from the FTC for seven “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising,” outline in this Interactive Advertising Bureau report. But for this discussion, it’s important to note that the regulations do not affect collection of data “solely for [the website’s] own uses,” or for contextual advertising like Adwords, “as it delivers advertisements based on the content of a Web page, a search query, or a user’s contemporaneous behavior” — the two main ways marketers use your data online.

What most marketers are concerned with are those non-regulated uses. Google Analytics, found 39 times more than the “average” tracker on the web, is largely for the company’s own use. Google, still the top dog for internet searches, puts its contextual ads right next to its search results — a strong source of revenue for its advertisers.

Analytics, despite privacy advocates’ concerns, is nothing to be afraid of. It’s only to make sites more responsive to their users. One of the greatest tools for the company owning (or managing) the site is to know how people actually use their site. Certainly, most hosting packages do this in a rudimentary way, but few have the immediate gratification of being able to see the site alongside what links are clicked.

Conversions from a Contact Page in Analytics

Landing Page overlaid with In-Page Analytics

The In-Page Analytics shows the percentage of clicks to the various pages in little pop-ups next to each link. Of course, it’s only tracking links to the page, so you have to take it with a few grains of salt if you have contextual linking on the page, but it gives site owners and especially ad campaign runners an idea of how to make their choices more relevant to browsers. The page below shows that almost 2% of visitors hit up the contact page from here, and another view shows us that a fifth of the people visiting the contact page complete a form — whether that’s good or bad is for the marketer to decide, but that information is certainly useful. Should that information not be in the hands of small businesses? The 12000 people searching for “block javascript” in Google think so.

And what about those 12000? How can I know that? Because Google “betrays” its users privacy and gives vague estimates of how much people search for various keywords. Again, this helps small businesses without walls of supercomputers to better gather data so that they can garner a little bit of information to better serve their customers.

Drilldown of Referrals from Other Sites

Finally, what about pages you visit that aren’t part of the site you’re on? Why would a site owner want to know that? Surely, they couldn’t want to know what page you were on before this one! But the internet is the ultimate word-of-mouth; “Who referred you?” becomes “From where were you referred?” and unfortunately, people just don’t pay enough attention to notice effectively on their own.

So instead of ineffective tools and sheer guesswork, the visitor loses a little privacy to help small business owners understand how people came to their site and make it better for those visitors by tailoring the content and design. And this is the mindset behind any loss of privacy for the visitor. Marketers like us aren’t trying to figure out who specifically visited our site and did what — if we were, we’d use other tools that can’t be so easily blocked, and would only be used for malicious visitors.

While some might call it “drinking the Kool-Aid,” I’ve understood more deeply why losing just a little privacy and not trying to circumvent analytics and other tools are a boon for the whole Internet — making it more valuable to the visitor, so that sites give to the reader what they really want. Stop worrying, and support your small businesses on the web.

Enter SEO and social media; suddenly this big bad world is more reminiscent of a classic ride at Disney World. You know, the one where all the little kids talk about how there isn’t that much difference between you and me regardless of language or location. That’s right, because it’s all about getting to know each other and figuring out how to communicate. This is exactly the purpose of using SEO and social media outlets to bring people to your business, except in our “big kid” world we call it public relations.

Okay, I understand that most of your pure business gurus out there believe that public relations is, and I quote, “just ass-kissing and party-planning.” Five to ten years ago they might have had a point, but in this contemporary economy the true principles of the craft are a huge part of why smaller companies have a fighting chance again. The consumer has a renewed interest in quality, and is willing to spend a little more for a more personable experience. While the bottom line is still net profit, they way to success lies within the methods you use to obtain your goals.

If Google and other search engines have replaced the YellowPages, then SEO has replaced the one-page ad. Sure, Adwords are still a highly profitable drive for visits and conversions, but the SEO in and of itself spans beyond the normal realm of marketing. A business owner takes special interest in what the consumer is looking for when they go searching. The use of these technologies can help a business mold their image into something much more appealing to the audience. They are interacting directly and specifically with their public through just a few small changes.

When you throw social media into the mix, then you are really getting some classic public relations action. The basic idea of the PR world is to promote goodwill for your company to its public. So a business going on Facebook to garner “likes” that convert to sales has to add things to this medium that will stir interest. Some of the typical things you will see in a business fan page are news, specials, and community projects. This is public relations! You are showing your consumer the good you do for them and the community. These simple acts inspire the kind of loyalty that results in a stronger bottom line.

In effect, established public relations principles mixed with cutting-edge marketing strategies not only gain customers, but implore them to be active members in the community that is your business. They feel a connection not only with what you do but also with the personal responses you show to your environment. This is the way small business regains its individual face, loyal customer base and larger profits. Now that’s something to plan a party for!

Image courtesy gamespot.com

Dear Paid Search Advertisers,

This {KeyWord:fallback phrase} is not your enemy.

Many veteran PPC marketers tend to vilify dynamic keyword insertions (or DKI). They usually present examples of DKI which have been obviously done by someone who is not skilled in the nuances of paid search copy writing – this bothers me.

It bothers me because I think there is a valid purpose for dynamic keyword insertion in paid advertising. While some uses are nefarious (let‘s be clear – I do not own a black hat) a lot of them are legitimately useful for marketing efforts.

First let’s talk about how to use DKI because after seeing some serious DKI GONE BAD, I figured I should explain how to use it.

When using DKI, you need to be careful of how you input the word “keyword” before the colon.
{keyword:________} would make your inserted keyword will not be capitalized. By capitalizing the “K” in {Keyword:________} the first letter of the word is capitalized. When you type {KeyWord::________} every word will be capitalized. And when you capitalize every letter i.e. {KEYWORD:________} all of your letters will be capitalized and searchers will think you are partially deaf and/or screaming your headline at them – don’t do this.

Now that I’ve explained how to use DKI, let’s move on to when it is appropriate to use it.

BE WARNED! I am not advocating DKI abuse – use at your own discretion.

Image courtesy of jeffreyhill.typepad.com

The Good Use of Leveraging Other Brands

The Eligible ad will fly through the review process unharmed because it does not directly mention Apple but the Under Review ad will result in you seeing this message time and time again:

Doing this can really help you penetrate a very specific niche of a larger market quickly and, if set up properly (i.e. exact matching the correct terms you want to appear in the headline), cost-effectively.

The Bad Use of Leveraging Other Brands

Using DKI for leveraging a competitors’ brand  is great when you want to undermine their newest promotion, expose possible unsightly transgressions, or just really piss them off.

Image courtesy of FOX TV Network

Let’s say you are the neighborhood traditional American restaurant and you want to increase your market share after some bad press comes out about a direct competitor – use it to your advantage.

Find all the variables and misspelling of their name, use one of those misspelling as your fallback phrase and have their actual brand name insert dynamically in the headline.

So if your competitor’s ad is in position one for the phrase “Bob‘s Burgers“:

Have your ad in position two with :

This will make your competitor $#*! a brick and Google won’t do anything because you are following their guidelines. This is like saying you love praying so you are giving it up for Lent – you got them in a technicality.

NOTE: I would never do this for a client – this is merely a suggestion for you devilish paid search marketers out there *polishes halo*

The Good Way to Avoiding Negative Approval Status

Another use of DKI is avoid long review process and disapprovals because of  “non-family“ or “adult” ad copy.  What are “non-family” and “adult” ads? Here’s the official definition:

Ads are reviewed and categorized as Family Safe, Non-Family Safe, or Adult Sexual Content depending on the content of the ad and website.

So basically anything part of the human anatomy and any word you wouldn’t say around your mother. I am frequently annoyed by this particular rule because I deal with a lot of plastic surgeons who perform cosmetic and reconstructive breast procedures. Breast – a word that is so mundane that to be considered “non-family” by the Search Overlord Googleus Maximus is ridiculous. I’m still confused that the headlines “Breast Cancer Treatment”, “Breast Implants Surgery”, and “See Big MILF Breasts Now” are all consider the same even though the context of the word is vastly different. Since this is a problem I run into on daily basis, using dynamic keyword insertion is pivotal to me getting ads up and running (without several phone calls and 5-7 business day wait time).

Here are some examples of ads that will be marked as “Non-family” and “Approved”.

Image courtesy of knowyourmeme.com

The Bad Way to Avoiding Negative Approval Status

Google hates drugs and at the top of their list seems to be medical mary jane. I’m not sure why, especially considering it is legal in California (and safer than all other drugs).

Regardless of Google’s Stalin impersonation, if you are trying to advertise on Google for marijuana related ads and terms you are gonna have to jump through some hoops. What I’ve learned from my time running a medical marijuana campaign is you can trick Google into approving your ads and use DKI to make your ad relevant to searchers.

EXAMPLE:

This is an ad I tried to run for for the lulz on a $100 free Google Adwords account just to see if I could do it. As soon as I hit the submit button, the image below appeared on my screen.

Google’s automated system was not in the mood for my shenanigans.

Using DKI, I changed the headline and even made the display url more ridiculous to prove a point and in less than 30 minutes my “medical marijuana” ad was not only Approved, it was receiving impressions.

The shocking part about this is my free Google Adword account’s medical marijuana ads were approved faster than a 6-year-old plastic surgery account that had the word “breast” in the adcopy (I swear Adwords’ review team is composed of untrained golden snub monkeys that respond negatively to the human anatomy – “DKI,” more like “DIK”.)

Image courtesy of zoofacts.com

They are sooooo cute but such terrible ad reviewers…

I guess this post was to make people aware it does not make you lazy, dumb, or a noob to use dynamic keyword insertion. In fact, I think if you know how to use is properly it can be extremely beneficial to your ad campaigns. Think of DKI as something to master, like martial arts. Could you possibly kill your ad group’s performance? Of course! But if you hone this skill you could be hundred hand slapping your ad competition, Kenshiro-style.

Image courtesy of knowyourmeme.com