Today, let’s just enjoy the fun of Instant Search. Ladies and Gentlemen, a Bob Dylan highway revisited via Google Instant Search:

It appears to be a game changer.

Google Instant gives you realtime organic (and paid) search results as you type in the search box at google.com. Here’s an animated demo (click on the image to see it animated):

This is undeniably cool. On my browser, it’s every bit as fast as the demo graphic above. But let’s look at what it does with paid search Adwords ads.

Google Instant and Adwords Paid Search

While I’m typing in my intended search phrase, Google is not only updating organic results (predicting what I’m most likely searching for), but also begins displaying paid search ads. For example, let’s say I start typing in “myrtle”…

By the time I get to “myr,” Google is predicting that I’m most likely searching for “myrtle beach.” It has begun displaying results most relevant to that keyword. But notice that it has also begun displaying paid search ads before I have completed my intended search phrase.

Take a look at the ads being displayed. So far they relate to “myrtle beach” in general (the ad in the #1 position is “Visit Myrtle Beach” and is linked to the local chamber of commerce site), but also is showing ads for “myrtle beach hotels” and “myrtle beach resorts” (numbers two and four in the predicted search terms drop down).

All well and good. If I were searching for hotels or resorts in Myrtle Beach, I got to relevant results faster than ever. But what if I my intended search was for “myrtle beach restaurants”? I’ve just been served a page full of irrelevant ads, exactly what AdWords was designed not to do!

This raises some questions for AdWords advertisers:

• At what point is an impression generated? In the example above, if I’m bidding on “myrtle beach resorts,” am I going to get an impression every time someone starts typing in “myrtle beach restaurants” (or any one of thousands of other possibilities starting with “myrtle beach”)?
• Has Google built in a delay before crediting an impression, or perhaps a maximum “pause” time (i.e., a certain amount of time that must pass with the searcher not entering in any more characters)?
• How does this effect Google’s crediting an impression (or click) to phrase or exact match?
• What effect will this have on long tail keywords? Long tail keywords can be a gold mine for the savvy AdWords manager, allowing him/her to bid on highly-targeted terms. Will Instant cause searchers to click off before they have completed the full keyword they would have typed in before? Does this mean the broad match and shorter keywords I’ve been eliminating like crazy suddenly become more relevant?

UPDATE: The official Google Adwords blog has published a clarification about how impressions will now be credited:

Google Instant changes the way we think about impressions. With Google Instant, an impression is counted if a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.

The first two impression-generators make sense to me, but the last one (stops typing for three or more seconds) is concerning. What if the person is distracted while entering the search query? What if they are a slow typer? (Parents, please make sure your kids get typing lessons!). Actually, the second one concerns me a bit as well: with Google Instant’s “flashing lights,” will users be more likely to say, “Ooh, shiny!” and click a result before they’ve reached full relevancy? [End of UPDATE]

Google Instant and Ad Position

Google Instant also changes the landscape of the Google results page. Because the search suggestions box remains open (apparently always showing at least five suggestions), the organic results (and any top position paid ads) are pushed further down the page. In many cases in my browser, organic results were pushed entirely below the fold, meaning that at least for a brief time (while the search is still entering characters), only paid ads were showing! Since it appears to me that Google has increasingly made the colored underlay behind the top paid results lighter and lighter, it is likely that position 1-3 ads will be more often confused with organic results. That might sound like a benefit at first, but consider: will that increase the likelihood of irrelevant clicks, as searchers are more likely to click without much thought on an organic result than they are on what they know to be an ad.

Furthermore, as the top paid results (if any show for a particular search) are pushed further down the page, it appears to me that the top secondary positions (typically positions 4-6) are made more prominent than ever. They catch the eye more than ever before, as they appear higher (even though they’re not) and immediately to the right of the search suggestions. Will we see more activity in positions 4-6 than before?

So far we haven’t seen any answers to these questions is any official AdWords publications. What do you think the effects on paid search will be (if any)? If you’re reading this some time after the September 8, 2010, rollout of Google Instant, have you noticed any significant changes in your impressions, click-through rates, and CPC bids-by-position since the inception?

To make a valid test, you need to try to keep keywords and landing pages as consistent as possible throughout the ad text test. This is why I said sometimes our desire to optimize gets in the way of our desire to test- we want to add modified broad match keywords! We want to change the headline on the landing page!  We wanna use Website Optimizer! But we’re going to screw our ad text test up, and that’s something we’re going to have to keep in mind.

In other words, if you change other variables connected to the ads you’re testing (keywords, landing pages) during the test period, you throw off the validity of the test. In a valid A/B test, you change just one variable (in this case, some difference in text between one add and the other) and keep all other variables the same.

Since if you are properly managing your AdWords accounts you will be changing keywords and landing pages all the time, it might be best to do ad testing on just a few select ad groups at a time, ad groups you’re willing to leave alone for enough time to generate valid test data for the ads you’re testing.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to http://foursquare.com and search for your business, using the search window to the upper right.
2. Click the orange button labeled “Do you manage this venue? Claim here.”



3. Follow the directions there to confirm your business information. That’s it!

Once you’ve claimed your business venue, you can create various “specials” to attract new customers who find your business on Foursquare.

• Mayor Specials can be claimed by the “mayor” of your venue (the user who has checked in most in the last 60 days). This should be something above and beyond what you offer in your other specials. This encourages frequent re-visits to your location, as others try to steal the now-coveted mayor title.
• Count-based Specials are activated when a user has checked in to your venue a certain number of times.
• Frequency-based Specials activate every-so-many check-ins (such as every 5th).
• Wildcard Specials require some special verification buy your staff (such as purchase of an entree, or showing the staff member your check-in).

If you own a local business with a physical presence, there is an obvious benefit to having your location associated with Facebook Place check-ins. Here’s how to do it:

1. Check whether your place exists. Attempt a check in via the updated Facebook for iPhone app (or through touch.facebook.com in your smart phone’s browser). If you don’t see your business, search for it, and you can add it.
2. Log in to Facebook and find your Place. If you see your check in on your wall, just click the place name. Otherwise, use Facebook search.
3. Once on the newly-created Place page for your business, click the “Is this your business?” link at the bottom of the page. If Facebook found a phone number for your business, click “Call me now” and follow up from there with the verification process. If no phone number is found, Facebook will require you to upload an e-version of one of several different documents verifying your ownership.

Once you’ve claimed your Places page, you’ll want to merge it with your existing Facebook Page. Once you’ve claimed your place, you should receive a prompt at your Place page to merge with your business’s Page.

More detailed explanations are in the official Facebook guide embedded below:

Facebook Places for Advertisers

The main intention of Google behind this seems to be to increase retention of advertisers who may have dropped out of the program because they believed AdWords was ineffective, when in truth the lack of effectiveness may have been the result of how little of the money they were turning over to their agencies was actually going into ads.

Is your current agency providing those metrics in your reports? If not, why not? Virante‘s paid search division has always included full disclosure of clicks, impressions, and actual ad spend, along with a host of other important metrics and KPI‘s.

To see Apture in action, hover your mouse over the icons that appear next to the two linked words in the first paragraph above. The first is a simple link preview. It displays the Apture home page in a popup box. The second demos an embedded video link. The reader can view the complete video without leaving your page!

Once you’ve signed up and installed the plugin, be sure to check out the advanced settings. They allow you to activate the search bar you now see when you scroll this blog page. In addition to its convenient share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and email, the search bar allows your visitors to search any topic and see results from your own site, Google, and from Apture’s over 20 rich media partner sites, again without leaving your page.

But there’s one more incredibly powerful feature: readers can highlight any word or phrase on your page and search it through Apture! Try it out with any word in this post.

*Apture is free for sites with less than 5 million page views per month.

Twylah automatically collects all your tweets on a nicely-branded, blog-like page. When you send out a tweet via Twylah, the program automatically appends a bit.ly link to the end of the tweet that brings the clicker to your personal Twylah page (which has a Twitter-style URL, e.g., http://twylah.com/virante). And this is where Twylah starts to beat out the Twitter home page in a number of interesting ways.

• Twylah presents your twitter stream, with a column to the right that displays the content of any link in the highlighted Tweet. Visitors get a chance to preview the content before clicking through.
• More importantly, every clicker is exposed to all of your recent content.
• More importantly to that, Twylah automatically creates a series of tabs above the stream that contain the main keywords you use in your tweets. Clicking one of those tabs reveals all your tweets on that subject. Automatic indexing of your Twitter feed!
• Twylah threads conversations generated from your tweets.
• Twylah offers four different views of your feed:
  • Home shows your tweet stream alongside the stream of your followers.
  • My Twylah Blog shows your tweets with any conversations (in threaded form) they generated right along side.
  • My Stream shows your followers’ tweets, with a handy reply box for whichever one you highlight
  • My Mentions shows any tweets that mention your twitter name, again with a reply box right at hand.
• For the latter two views, Twylah’s indexing tabs change to your followers most-used keywords, a very useful “listening” tool.

Any or Twylah’s views of your Twitter streams can be further filtered to show only tweets with conversations, or tweets with articles or videos attached.

The video below gives a nice overview of Twylah’s features and what the pages actually look like.

Meet Twylah – She creates a blog out of your tweets from krystlecho on Vimeo.

R Vaughn's music video was shot & edited on an iPhone 4. Click to watch the video.

It’s a no-brainer that including media brings life to any campaign. This is especially true in the hyperactive world of social media, where a constant barrage of posts vies for the attention of potential fans and followers.

Of course, when it comes to attention-grabbing, a picture is (perhaps literally) worth a thousand words. And a video…well, a video may not be worth a thousand pictures, but it certainly beats a still pic by a good margin!

Even today, though, many managing social media campaigns probably shy away from using original video due to perceptions of high production cost and the belief that only highly-trained professionals with expensive equipment can produce worthwhile videos.

Click to watch video

So not true. Here’s one example. A non-profit I consult for is changing the location of its annual conference for the first time ever, away from their headquarters city. They were a little nervous about attracting people so used to going to one place year-after-year to a new, but more exciting, venue (Virginia Beach). The solution: send a vivacious young couple with a handheld camera down to the Virginia Beach boardwalk to check out the varied eateries and film one minute “reviews.” Slap on some fun music and a few titles, release one a week, and you’ve sent a message. The new conference spot is going to be a fun getaway!

Another example is the music video linked through the image at the top of this post. According to this story on CNN.com, this very professional-looking video was shot, edited, and uploaded to YouTube and the singer’s web site using only an iPhone 4 and the $4.95 iMovie app. That’s within anybody’s budget. (Tip: While it’s cool that the video was edited in a phone app, most users recommend downloading the finished phone cam video to a computer and doing the editing there, where you’ll have much more flexibility and options to choose from.)

What’s stopping you from getting video into you social media campaigns?

Simply put, modified broad match keywords lets you make selected words within your broad match keyword phrase “sticky.” In other words, properly marked words within the broad match keyword must be present in the search match, while all other words are matched more loosely, according to the established parameters for broad match. To mark a word within a broad match keyword as “sticky,” just add a plus sign (+) in front of the word.

EXAMPLE: A keyword of “+key +west resorts” could yield “key west hotels” or “resorts in key west” or “key west oceanfront rentals,” but would never yield “florida resorts.”

The advantages of modified broad match keywords will be most keenly felt by those who have campaigns that are tightly restricted to phrase- and exact-match keywords. Modified broad match has the potential to open up new possibilities of capturing formerly missed click and conversion opportunities, without the danger of opening things up so broadly that money is being thrown away.