For the past two years, Razorfish has supported charity: water’s digital marketing efforts by managing donated media, providing social strategy consulting and manning their paid search program, funded by Google Grants. charity: water is an NYC-based nonprofit “bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.” As one of the most digitally savvy nonprofits, garnering the loyal support of big name celebrities (Adrian Grenier, Justin Bieber, and Jenna Elfman, to name a few) and thousands of people like you and me, charity: water has helped more than 2 million people in just 5 years. Earlier this month, they kicked off their 5^th anniversary “September Campaign,” the goal of which is to raise $1.2 million for a drilling rig.

The nonprofit space has been an interesting foray for the Razorfish search team. Earlier this year, Google launched the Google For Nonprofits program, which provides a wider range of free or discounted services for grantees.

Last year’s challenge was cleaning up the account in order to increase traffic volume. The charity: water SEM account was managed internally until the partnership began. We worked countless hours on:

-          Reorganizing charity: water’s keyword portfolio into semantic ad groups

-          Refreshing ad copy

-          Updating landing pages

-          Expanding the portfolio to cover geographically-oriented searches

And this year, in addition to all of the wonderful work we do for current clients, the team is focusing on performance optimizations to increase valuable traffic volume. Limits of the Google Grants program force us to be innovative. According to Search Account Executive Hana Lee, “I think our  biggest challenge is the $1.00 bid limit. For some brand exact terms, we are not in first position and often don’t appear at all. That leaves us to heavily depend on CTR to increase our quality score.” Things we search marketers take for granted – for example, conversion tracking – are not available to fully help us gauge the success of our efforts.

In addition to overcoming the bid limit, we aim to:

-          Study where our audience resides so we can effectively utilize geo-targeting options

-          Expand our negative keyword coverage

-          Utilize a stronger call to action

-          Utilize insights from Google Analytics

What are your thoughts on nonprofits in the digital space, useful KPI’s and the role of private sector companies in ‘giving back’?

I’ve been an avid user of Gmail after officially retiring my AOL account, which uncreatively flaunted my obsession with Orlando Bloom and Phantom Planet. On a personal level, Gmail ads at the top of my inbox were never very noticeable and always in the background. One of my more recent email chains was about the imminent death of a family pet, and next to it one day was Google’s new Facebook-like, shareable ad format. And beneath it was a plain old text ad featuring “Chew Proof Dog Beds.”

I just read a great Search Engine Watch article by Jonathan Allen, titled “Will New Gmail Ad Formats Be Totally Worth Dating, Engaging, Marrying & Having Babies With?” He brought up some great points, including:

“The fact that these new ad formats have already caught my attention. Somehow, until these ads showed up, I was completely unconscious of the fact that I just don’t even see contextual ads in GMail – they are just a mess of text to the side of my emails that I can easily ignore. Whereas these new ads show up like little badges and there is something curiously tempting about them – like the unread message marker is working subconsciously on my brain. he actual content provided by advertisers so far has been tedious, unappealing or vague. However, they are forgiven for not bombarding me with display advertising and moving graphics. The discreetness works, and in many cases, there is something rewarding about a large, good looking, original and creative image in the email.”

Search engine marketers deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword buys on a daily basis. Client portfolios consist of creatives and keywords, which can become rather unruly as offers, products, and the websites themselves change. It’s kind of like a mother’s upkeep of her coupon collection – she has hundreds of categories, deals, and start and end dates to manage, while budgeting at the same time. I’m still not sure how my mom did it for 18 years!

When a searcher enters a keyword like “red SeeSawline stapler” into a search engine, they’re led to a search engine results page (SERP) filled with ads. Ideally, the searcher will click on an ad, which leads to a specific website. Imagine this: each keyword in a client portfolio leads to a specific URL, so each of those “landing pages” will have to be updated if any changes are made to that website.

This is where an amazing Excel formula, taught to me by my colleague Isaac Chinitz, comes in handy.

Let’s say that your keyword, “red SeeSawline stapler,” leads searchers to the URL http://www.fakestaplerstore.com/seesawline/xx_xxx=engine_blah&blah&blah&blah.

FakeStaplerStore.com recently made changes to their SeeSawline landing pages, so you have to update each landing page to http://www.fakestaplerstore.com/redseesawline in your portfolio.

To isolate your landing pages from a URL that includes codes at the end of your URLs (in this example, we want to remove xx_xxx=engine_blah&blah&blah&blah), highlight the column in which you’re working and bring up the Find and Replace box.

1. Enter ?xx_xxx* into the Find what section.
2. Leave the Replace with section empty.
3. Press Replace All.
4. You should be left with nothing but http://www.fakestaplerstore.com/seesawline/

This will remove everything after your landing page, starting at xx_xxx! Now you can Find and Replace anything that’s http://www.fakestaplerstore.com/seesawline/ with http://www.fakestaplerstore.com/redseesawline.

To isolate your codes from your landing page, highlight another column in which you’re working and bring up the Find and Replace box again.

1. Enter *? xx_xxx into the Find what section.
2. Enter xx_xxx into the Replace with section.
3. Press Replace All.
4. You should be left with nothing but xx_xxx=engine_blah&blah&blah&blah.

This will remove everything except for your landing page, starting at xx_xxx. Now you can concatenate your landing pages to the codes you preserved.

A month ago, sniffling from office germs, I sat down to watch Funny People, the 2009 Judd Apatow comedy featuring Adam Sandler and Seth Rogan. The most interesting part of the two hours I could sit through was George Simmon’s/Adam Sandler’s performance at a Myspace corporate event. This was enthralling to me because I hadn’t thought about MySpace since I shut down my profile last December.

Back in 2006, I couldn’t decide between MySpace and Facebook. MySpace was customizable and catered to music lovers. Facebook was rigid in design and seemed to focus more on relationships, whether it be with people or the things we love. Today, computers and mobile phones are saturated with more exciting choices – we tweet with Twitter, check in with Foursquare, kvetch on Yelp and, well…facebook with Facebook. Consumers make sure they’re dedicating time to managing personality extensions that are worth their while.

Take a look at interest in MySpace over the past few years:

This scathing little article, written back in October 2009, succinctly describes MySpace’s current presence. In “Social Network Failure: What Happened to MySpace? #fail,” Kyle James writes that “it will never be the same beast that claimed over 75% of the market.” Other disruptors have prevailed in the social media battleground because they continued to innovate and listen to consumers, while figuring out sustainability.

Dan Reisinger reports in his CNet blog, The Digital Home: “’We’ve been clear that MySpace is a problem,’ News Corp. President and COO Chase Carey said yesterday during [a call with analysts]. ‘The current losses are not acceptable or sustainable. Our current management did not create these losses but they know we have to address them.’” Over the past two months, MySpace rolled out a spiffy new logo and a site redesign, catered toward Gen Y, and now claims to be a “social entertainment platform.”

Is anyone even paying attention? Is there hope?

I’ve been a regular user of Facebook since it’s inception in 2004, when it was first marketed amongst collegians as an exclusive social network. When I heard about it from my randomly-assigned freshman roommate, I could barely grasp what she was talking about. “A face? Whose face? A book? What kind of book?” “No, no,” she said, exasperated. “F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K. Dot com!” Over the next four years, my relationship with Facebook mutated more often than Burger King’s marketing campaign; my peers and I generated online personas and expanded our networks exponentially, all under the semblance of control and ownership.

The rate of change in Facebook rivals its rate of integration into our lives. For hours on end, we update, like, share, chat and peruse the profiles of friends, bands, companies…of everything and nothing at all. This behavior makes Facebook the perfect vessel through which companies can reach their audiences. Given the time we spend on Facebook, the nature of what we share and the potential data available to advertisers, privacy is certainly important to users. But how important?

The general consensus is that consumers will continue to “sacrifice” their privacy because they value the experience so much. Maybe Facebook will continue to serve 400 million users because it’s made mistakes and innovations in a way that makes it seem like its growing up with its audience. We believe Facebook is listening and making every effort to protect us. Like parents who thrive on that semblance of control and ownership, millions of users, save for a fraction of outspoken and conscious ones (like, say, 35,000 people), won’t care about Open Graph and its ability to “target you on an even more granular level,” nor the Graph API, which “makes it much easier to parse, collate and thus search through user info.” More specifically, Open Graph allows website URLs to be part of the Facebook universe and advertisers are able to trace and track users who connect to those websites, much like Facebook Pages.

As an avid Facebook user and marketer, the big question after the ruckus dies down about things like “privacy” and “transparency” is whether or not most people care. And not only do I wonder how many people care, but who exactly cares?

We want to hear from you! Do you think a significant amount of users negatively react after companies adapt this new knowledge stream? How will Facebook resolve its liminal stance between connecting users and monetizing their participation?

In search, the Excel vlookup function is used on a daily basis to synthesize massive amounts of data. Like men with women, we usually take vlookup’s merits for granted. We’re entirely dependent on its speed and accuracy, but when things go awry we feel hopeless.

Around here, ‘vlookup’ is a verb. We eat, sleep and vlookup.

If you have a list of keywords, each with numerical identifiers, and you need to attribute them to the correct redirect URL, enter the vlookup function like this:

=vlookup(C8, Report!$E$7:$K$327, 7, 0)

which translates to:

=vlookup(cell containing your keyword’s identification number, a range on another spreadsheet containing your redirect URLs and the keyword to which they match, the number of rows to the right of the keyword, and 0)

Problems can occur during the matching process. For example, if your data sets are in different formats, Excel won’t be able to match one to another, and will leave “#N/A” behind. In the search world, this is likened to a pile of $%($*&%&#. Even if you change the column format to text or general or numbers, nothing changes!

What may help in this particular situation is this pretty little formula:

=IFERROR((VLOOKUP((J8*1), [Report_1271326324069.xls]Report!$E$7:$K$327, 7, 0)),0)

This iferror formula converts all #N/A’s to 0’s, and multiplies the reference cells containing the numerical identifiers (J8) by 1, forcing it to be a number.