This inspired me to spread the continuing education love and share some small steps you must be taking in your keyword research and selection to make your paid search advertising campaigns successful.

Before you set up a campaign, you always start with your planning phase—the volume research, the competitive analysis, etc. This is an important phase. More important, though, is what comes after you launch your campaign: the keyword optimization. It’s important that you keep an eye on your keywords, measure performance, and use your findings to perfect your paid efforts.

Things to look for during the keyword optimization phase:

Absolutely review your search query reports regularly

• This tells you what detailed searches your visitors are actually finding you through and can drive a lot of your decisions regarding bidding strategies, budgets, negative keywords and more.

Look for themes and opportunities to break out campaigns or ad groups

• Your search query reports should start to reveal some behavioral trends among your visitors and give you ideas about how to narrow down your messages into more targeted ad groups.

Implement Exact Match on well-performing words

• Noticing standout data on a few keywords in particular? First, nice work! Now make those words work harder for you. This is a good time to implement exact match if you’re not already, and break it out into its own group so you can bid with a little more freedom and confidence.

Finally, just generally remember to think like the consumer. Remember, you are one yourself! Consider how people outside of your industry think and the language they might choose. Look at your keywords and consider alternate ways to say them. Are there any detailed keyword phrases that you could bid on that might not attract volume but just may pull in highly qualified traffic?

While simple concepts, there’s no denying that these steps aren’t quick. They do take patience and a bit of a time investment. But apply the TLC, and the return should be rewarding.

The envisionit media brand is now alive and well on the mobile web. If you haven’t seen it yet, get out your fancy phone and take a look (the new mobile site is currently limited to iPhone and Droid visitors only.) The site features a mobile-optimized version of this here blog, a teaser-style version of our portfolio, and the basic nuts and bolts about who we are and what we do. So, go check it out–and let us know what you think!

Be greeted by the adorable Carol herself when you arrive on the home page. Delight in that gigantic, mouth-watering cookie imagery. Order cookies right online for your household, the office, or as a gift to say thanks or congrats or happy Wednesday! And for your quick Carol’s fix, check out the Where to Buy section to find your closest Carol’s retailer.

No need to thank us for the heads up on this little CarolsCookies.com refresh. …But if you are so inclined sugar, snickerdoodle, chocolate chip, and toffee crunch are just a few of our favorites flavors.

Although lots of people still do their shopping in stores, there is one resource that almost everyone utilizes. Yep, you said it, the Internet! I know this is a big surprise to everyone, but the important thing to focus on isn’t the fact that people use the Internet to do their shopping, but HOW they use it to shop.

There are a cornucopia of different resources (blogs, social networks, email services, rewards & directories, cross-shopping) that can be used to find information about products/deals, but one resource that single-handedly dominates all of them is, search engines. Take a peak at this graph from Hitwise -

Need I say more? Optimizing your website for SEO and utilizing SEM techniques are essential if you want to show up on the first page (49% of people don’t go past the first page) of any of the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing). With that said, you could hypothetically add 2x the amount of prospective customers you already have just by optimizing your website. There is a catch though (isn’t there always?). Although, SEO can happen fairly quickly, building a high page rank for a site doesn’t happen over night, it takes time, and the better optimized your site is over a longer period of time, will ultimately control how high your page is ranked on the search engines.

So my advice is, get your website optimized as soon as possible! Here’s a Tip – check out Google Insights, and see what terms people use that are relevant to your product during the holidays. So when the  season comes around and consumers are ready to shell out the big-bucks for their loved ones, you’re the company in the forefront where they spend that holiday cash, not the unnoticed business standing in the shadows of the well optimized websites on the first page of the search engines.

If you’re managing paid search campaigns for your company, or your own business, you’ve probably heard the talks the past year over the Yahoo to Bing transition. If you’ve been living on Mars, then you should know that Yahoo paid search ads will soon be running through the Bing AdCenter, but ads will be shown on both Yahoo And Bing sites. Below are some differences in the two campaign managers and some changes you should make to your accounts.

• Character Limits are shorter in Bing. Yahoo has a 40-character limit for ad titles, Bing has a 25-character limit. Yahoo descriptions can be 71 characters, Bing only allows 70. Your ads will look cut off and quite funny if you don’t make these changes. Focus on the benefits of what you’re selling, test your ads, and make sure they are relevant!
• Like Google, Bing treats singular/plural variations and common misspellings as individual words. Yahoo treated them as one word, so you will need to expand your keyword list to ensure you are getting traffic from these modifiers. This helps to give you more control over your keywords and to modify your campaign for the phrases that are not converting.
• Bing minimum bids start at $.05. Yahoo starting bids are $.01, so if any of your keywords are set at this min, they will be automatically increased to $.05. However, they will also be automatically paused to allow you to confirm or make adjustments to the bids.

If you’re not running paid search on Yahoo/Bing, but only focusing on Google, you should reconsider. Where Google still holds the highest share of searches worldwide (65% in June according to comScore), Yahoo/Bing will now gain a larger percentage of the market share (almost 31%!!), and through working with our clients, we have seen that while volume is not as high as Google, we can actually sometimes get a lower cost per conversion/lead by running on Yahoo/Bing. One thing we like to do is get our clients started in Google, then duplicate the campaigns across Yahoo/Bing and modify from there.

For more information, visit the Yahoo Transition Center online or ask your interactive agency for more information.

Blog readers, meet Ari Franklin. He’s the new Associate Project Manager who joined our team last month.

Ari comes to us from the account team at a large branding agency here in Chicago, and he’s now helping to coordinate and streamline the production of envisionit media’s interactive projects. Since he began, Ari’s experience and strategic thinking has been upping the momentum of our projects and helping to cement our many new client relationships. As he continues to settle in here, we look forward to the ways in which he’ll help our team create work that stays on schedule and on strategy.

When asked the old “what do you like most about being here” question, Ari mentioned the supportiveness of the envisionit media team. When asked him what he does for fun, he sort of blanked out in that way people do when asked to talk about themselves.

So, in the spirit of supportiveness, I’ll fill in the blanks based on what I’ve observed over the past month: When Ari’s not working, he’s messing with his Droid, eating gigantic sandwich wraps from Rosati’s and keeping up with interactive blogs and websites.

Welcome aboard, Ari!

My father has a real knack for taking photos of people while they’re eating. And then he posts those photos on his Wall. I don’t object to dad-friendly social networking, nor do I care too strongly about the less-than-flattering photos. But, generally, I like to keep these photos safely away from the eyes of my colleagues and exes.

With the passing of another 4th of July, another family event, another unfortunate photoshoot at Famous Dave’s, we at envisionit thought it would be a great time to point you towards our friends at Chattertree.

Chattertree is a private social-networking website for families. It lets you create private “rooms” where you and your family members can stay in touch, plan family events, video chat, send reminders, share gift lists, and share videos and photos that are probably best kept close to the hearth. Like the poet’s blouse debacle of 1992. Or the time you had pink eye on Thanksgiving.

Check it out today, and then share all the gluttonous fun from your family’s 4th of July!

With that said, let me give all of you local/nationwide/global business owners out there one small tip of advice I’ve learned while interning here: Use Social Media!! Unless you’ve been living under a rock (no offense if that’s your preferred living space), you’ve probably heard about Twitter and Facebook.  So you have heard about it? (I hope so) Are you using it? (Most likely) But the real question is; HOW are you using it?  Facebook currently has 400+ million users and Twitter is at 75 million, and botH can be great for promoting your business.  But on the other hand, there are already many other businesses being social, so it can be very hard to stand out amongst the crowd.

I’m a “Gen Y” child, so I am very aware of all the new social media platforms that are available out there. I definitely use Facebook and Twitter multiple times a day. Personally, when I use these platforms I know that I’m being bombarded with advertisements, fan pages, events, apps, etc.   90% of which I see, delete, and they never cross my mind again. When I actually pay attention to any ads, pages, or apps, is when I see one that a number of my friends have previously viewed, or one that’s so new, creative, and innovative that I can’t help but want to be a part of it.

Here at envisionit, we love integrating our clients into the world of interactive and when it comes to social media (a growing piece of the proverbial pie), we can help your company with the following: target the right consumers, create exposure & awareness, create word of mouth buzz for your business, to ultimately make your business stand out amongst the “social” crowd.

• What is the best way to track social media referrals? Through an advanced, custom segment in Google Analytics. Re-writing your URLs to track these referrals can actually hinder your data, not help it. Also use custom alerts to proactively know right away when major increases from social media channels occur.
• How do you know what your BAD keywords look like? – Use your internal site search reports and organic search keywords to determine what keywords are bringing traffic to your site, and if any of them are irrelevant to your business. If you find “bad” ones, adjust your SEO strategy and tweak your meta tags.
• Why is my Exit rates showing 0%? Why did I think this one was important and relevant to all? Well, because this is a BUG in Google Analytics. Yes, Google might be everywhere but they’re not perfect. From our experience, if you see data that looks too good (or bad!) to be true, it might just be. Question the data, look deeper into it, and contact Google if you see a problem in your analytics (but don’t hold your breath on a call back).
• How should I track testing and production environments? Google recommends actually using separate code if you need to track your development site from your live site.
• How does Webmaster tools provide data different than Google Analytics? One major piece of data is being able to see impressions and clicks to your site in Webmaster Tools for certain keywords, as well as what position they were in the search engine when it was clicked on and viewed.
• What is the best way to track PDF downloads? Google recommends using Event Tracking, which helps to keep everything organized and segmented in your reporting. If you’re going to track them as Goals as well, use the fake pageview method and make your fake pageview naming structure clean and easy to follow.
• How do I find what keywords visitors are using on their mobile phone to arrive at my site? You can find this data by going through the Traffic Report> Keywords and then click “Segment” at the top of the Google Analytics user interface and then click “Mobile”.

If you have an intern with some time on their hands, check out the full length video below.