Monetizing Social Media – Set your targets and expectations!

Today’s article on eMarketer predicted social media ad spending on Facebook to grow around $3 billion, essentially reiterating the social giant’s firming grip on the digital advertising share. According to them, the ad spending on the world’s top social network will reach $2.19 billion this year in the US and just over $4 billion worldwide – both more than double last year’s figure.

For a business or brand owner, this could trigger incremental investment in social media efforts, especially on Facebook. But regardless of whether you a Fortune500 brand or a sole proprietor, the basic rules of the game never change. So, make sure you have a good grip of the following big five once you decide to embark on monetizing your social media.

Goals – Social media is cool, useful & free. But when it comes to monetizing, the rule of the game changes. With Facebook’s current estimated reach of 134 million adult (Over 18) users living in the United States, how can you not “Like” it? Any campaign on Facebook should revolve around these 3 goals:

• Awareness or Branding – High volume of impressions lends a hand to brand building.
  

• Clicks – CTR( click through rates) tends to range between 0.04% (something similar to display ads) and 0.2% (somewhat closer to a low search performance). But given the huge volume of impressions , even small CTRs can go a long way in generating desired level of clicks against any call to action.
  

• Actions –Facebook “Like” is just one of the many possible call to actions. In fact, when it comes to actions, I have never treated Facebook any differently than how I treat search, display or even mobile. Your options are unlimited! A “Fan Like” is just one of them. We get the most out of client campaigns when we “split actions”.

The first version is a direct response call to action.

The second version is a  call to action towards a Facebook asset ( In this case, “Fan Like”).

Targeting –  A lot of us, tend to get caught up in ad, creative and sometimes neglect the demographics. This does not hurt too much for search but when it comes to Facebook ads, you want to keep a razor sharp focus in terms of targeting.

The biggest strength of Facebook ad platform is their estimating tool. The more granular your targeting is, the better yield you leverage out of your campaigns in terms of customer and prospect engagement. The challenge however lies in how best you can narrow down your audience from those 135 million Americans and 500 million worldwide.

So..Investigate and be innovative beyond age, gender, birthdays, language & education. The biggest opportunity lies with “Interests”. Here’s a campaign that we ran for an university’s sustainability program. Given the extremely niche audience, no age limit or professional restriction, no defined levels ( it’s both a credit and a non-credit course), we knew that the key to our success will depend on how well defined we are with capturing the interests.

• The campaign has been able to draw more than 0.1% Click Through Rate( considered a runaway success from a Facebook benchmark standpoint) with less than 30% bounce rate( relevant and right on target audience) and a 3.04% goal conversion ( this is the key!). The average goal conversion from other channels for this program varied between 2-4%.
  

 

Landing page experience – Landing pages ultimately drive all online campaign goals. The more relevant and aligned the landing pages are to the ad copy, the more successful your campaign is.

Facebook is no different.

Recently, we tested 5 different ad copies and used 2 different landing pages for a travel industry campaign. The first 3 were directed to the website. We put a special offer on the landing page that reflected the offer on the ad.

 

 

The next 2 ads landed on a custom fan special tab on Facebook, which had a similar offer but additionally drove the “Like” metric. All other parameters, including targeting, remained consistent.

After a  month, the click through and goal conversion rates for campaigns directed to the website were higher than those directed to the Facebook tab. Now.. this is not typical, even within the industry. We have seen contrasting results for different clients. Hence, the need for testing landing pages in order to establish audience behavior and preferences for your particular brand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drive your game plan with numbers – Please measure, measure and measure your social media investments. Facebook has a strong reporting portal. But you should be ready to go beyond and derive ROI from your Facebook ads, just the same way you do for your other paid digital channels. With some exceptions, we mostly run  multi channel marketing for our clients. In this case, we ran a Facebook ad campaign and a Google Adwords campaign, all at the same time, with the same set of goals, for an energy company. Once again using custom URLs for all of our Facebook campaigns that enable us to track beyond clicks, impressions and click through, we tracked total visits to the site and goal conversion rates for both the campaigns. Here are some of the results:

• There were 39 Goal-1 conversions from Facebook (Social) compared to 64 from Google Adwords (Search).
  
• Cost per conversion for Facebook worked out much lower than Search for Goal-1.
  
• However for Goal-2 – A higher value goal and directly related to sales – conversions were higher for Google than for Facebook.
  
• Conclusion – It was easier to pull conversions for higher value goals when people are actually in an advanced state of search for similar product or services (search).
  
• Social works well for branding or small value goal conversions (catalog request, email signups etc).
  

Think about it. How in the world we could have possibly known this if we did not measure our efforts?

 

 

Finally , get into the right mindset –

1. Just because a Facebook ad is cheaper doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy. You are, in fact, targeting an audience who’s in no frame of mind to buy from you right now, unlike search, where you are serving relevant ads to folks already looking for similar service/product. This actually makes Facebook a more difficult channel to yield results.
   
2. The above often leads to a situation when you risk mindless spending. Seeking professional help might make sense.
   
3. From a consumer standpoint, social & search marketing are aimed at two different strata of mental state for brand engagement and needs to be distinct in order to derive effective results.
   
4. From a marketer’s standpoint , due to it’s nascent nature, the investment risks for a social media channel, especially Facebook are still lot higher than any other forms of online advertising.
   

Here’s my wish list of things that I would like Facebook to change:

• Clarity on ad position and ranking parameters – How’s my ad rank determined or what parameter(s) determines the impression? What drives the rank position, now that there are 5 ads that can be served on a page? Is it just the bid ? If so, then Facebook is falling prey to the hands of the wealthy brands at the risk of losing smaller but more powerful and relevant advertisers – something Google has strategically avoided.
  
• Ad variations – How come I am just allowed a combination of only an image & text? What about mobile? How does my ad render on Facebook smart phone apps? Will video ads be ever allowed?
  
• Bidding process , quality score – We search marketers live & breadth by Quality Score. It helps us to outperform the bigger and the stronger brands with all the money power but weak ad creative, irrelevant landing pages and/or keywords. There are no set quality scores on Facebook to guide me during hours of need.
  
• What happened to keywords ? Any plans on bringing them back, now that Google ( despite all the denials) is reflecting social results on search pages?
  

I hope all of my fellow digi-marketers out there are trying or willing to try this powerful marketing platform. As always, we are here to help. Please “Like Us” on Facebook and be entered to win one free Facebook or AdWords campaign- building, monitoring and reporting using a custom URL for your brand. The offer includes all creative work for the ads in the campaign.

Share your thoughts , bring your comments and let’s get the conversation started here at Curve Trends Marketing.

Best,

Bibi

Strategic offline marketing might be the key to success in 2011

It’s been an accepted fact that the growth & brand success metrics in 2011 will be redefined. A significant portion will be determined by how effectively companies dovetail their offline marketing with the burgeoning online presence. By offline, I am not referring merely to just print, tv or radio advertising.

No matter how much we web marketers and social media strategists kill ourselves with memos of obliterating offline existence, we still prefer to go to tweetups , engage in conversations over coffee ,  make a point to attend conferences and additionally make sure those conferences have a plethora of “networking” sessions. All of these and more are part of offline marketing efforts, especially for B2B ventures, consultants and startups.

For majority of retailers, financial institutions and/or other B2C entities, any customer facing brick and morter store or a customer service division ( I hate the term call center) are part of their offline marketing mix.

In his recent blog post, Joe Pulizzi of Junta 42 made a pretty strong case of intertwining the two channels.

From a customer standpoint, offline media still holds a significant comforting appeal that can’t be neglected. Reading the morning newspaper, picking up magazines before boarding a flight or a train, watching tv at the gym or after dinner, are hard to give up habits. It’s still easier and more assuring to engage online with someone only after that first coffee meeting or a drink at the networking session, wherever it was.

Another reason to have thousands of offline or physical “web related conferences” all over the country & the world.

From a marketer’s standpoint, offline is still by & large an easier medium to get attention from the most relevant audience.

A recent article on the Business Insider reported that a comfortable 18% businesses stated they will increase their spending on print in 2011. The article does not cover how many additionally will maintain their current spending.

So for those who are thinking of completely moving out of offline presence and placing their brands at the mercy of virtual world, it might actually make more sense to start weaving a strategic offline plan into this year’s marketing mix .

I have always been a strong proponent of multi-channel marketing. But this time, I am even more determined to act.  Hence, this  opening blog topic for the new year from a hardcore “web marketer” like me.

What do you think? What else do you do other than your online efforts to get your brand name out there?

Please let us know.

Here’s wishing you a successful, multi-channel happiness filled year ahead!

Back to Basics – Aligning Relevancy in Online Marketing

For the online marketing world, 2010 was well..let’s see.. Crowded!

Social media, mobile, local, we heard it loud & clear!

Google & Facebook war, Foursquare & Facebook places, digital insanity  in the name of  mobile apps,  busy, crowded, loud social music, sounding more like noise – we saw and heard it all. Local & mobile stormed to the forefront. There was a new guy in town- Assange, publishing ( read – leaking) classified documents. Suddenly publishing was the new buzz word .

All of  this was done in the name of content and brand engagement.

But sadly behind the scenes, we failed to notice a silent erosion of relevancy.   We did not care if our actions justified the dollars spent, or whether our clients or our “brands” are aligned to the channels and the technology that’s been thrown at us by scores every day.  It was just cool and we had to embrace and adopt them. We forgot to ask that million dollar question “what works?”.

Personally, I witnessed advertising cost creeping up, citing competition. This, while Yahoo fell back, Bing lost share and Google flexed muscle. Marketing agencies struggled to keep up with the noise while weeding through the best and the most relevant solutions for our clients. Facebook ad spend surged but with questionable targeting and limited reporting – acceptable as long as it is for the purpose of brand building . More in a detailed post coming up.

Agreed, it was a year of technology and channel upswing. I  doubt if relevancy followed suit.

Passing through JFK the other day, my husband & I were drawn to this eatery – Croque Madame (terminal 2), offering mounted ipads on each table for ordering. Travelers were more intrigued by this seemingly, interactive brilliance, from what we overheard. Really?? Interactive?? The ipads weren’t for food or ambience review (both of which were  great). It also didn’t allow any brand engagement. We were willing to check out their facebook page and check-in using facebook places /foursquare, provided we got some  consumer recognition (read-deals). None of those were possible. Yet this huge investment was made in the name of technology. What do we classify this as? Irrelevance or incompetency? I wonder if they stopped to asked themselves “how can we make this work” before embarking on embracing the coolness.

Hope 2011 brings more technology, better channels and increased action based on relevancy. Here’s to a happy & successful new year!

-Bibi

A Social Mindset – Revamped!

I was fortunate enough to hear Mitch Joel of twist image and the author of Six Pixels of Separation, speak at a lunch session in Burlington, Vermont this afternoon. The intriguing hour & a half opened up a lot more questions in my mind than I had anticipated. Here’s what my search marketer brain is trying to process currently:

1. Segmentation – Rich Nadworny of Digalicious raised a timely & relevant question – “ should all brands do social media”?  According to Mitch- ” All brands should share”. What remained unanswered was – What channels & audiences should these brands engage with? Should all brands share on every digital channel that they can lay their hands on while engaging their entire audience during all times?

If not , then how do the brands segregate the audience or the channel? How to determine if the Facebook audience for a brand  is tolerant of  higher interaction frequency  or more forgiving than perhaps the twitter audience? Somewhat similar to how we deal with direct traffic vs. search traffic in search marketing world. Or is there no such norm?  Will segmenting social media channels cannibalize any other medium? How does YouTube, which adds another layer of interactivity, fit into this engagement strategy? How do you draw the line between sharing too much vs. too little?

2. HIPPO factor– Discussions revolved around what should be the sharing “guidelines” vs. “policy” for employees at workplace. But who decides on those guidelines? What is the HIPPO’s role here? Unfortunately, still today, a lot of them have rigid unidirectional mental model.  How does the fluid social strategy accommodate a HIPPO?

3. Metrics and benchmark – Justin Cutroni, the author of Analytics Talk pointed out the need for establishing benchmarks and metrics in the social media arena. Sadly, a bulk of the brands and their digitized social strategy, still does not involve metrics or measurements. One might argue that there is an overload of data available for social media tracking but how about identifying and establishing key performance indicators? Is there any action on that front? Not much from what I hear.

4. Chris Brogran’s Math– In a post earlier today, Chris Brogan predicts “Social Crash”. According to him 100 small Twitter conversations+120 emails a day+10 phone calls=13 hours of work per day. It’s true that most of us are not as connected as Chris Brogan and have less than an average of 150 connections to engage with. I somehow tend to agree on his hyper-connectivity theory. Regardless of our volume of connection, some of us are seriously hyper-connected. Is that a problem? Are we heading towards a social crash?

I hope this post doesn’t exude any cynicism because that’s exactly what it’s not supposed to do. Some of my digital beliefs and thought process were overhauled during the lunch session this afternoon. Kudos to the #btvsmb team , Rich Nadworny and Mitch Joel . Mission Accomplished!

Strategy of a Circle Campaign

Often times we tend to run single focus campaigns. It could be just an email blast or a blog or a facebook post or just a print mailing. To me, it’s an incomplete attempt to engage your audience. I am a huge believer of what I call “campaigns in tandem”.

Let’s say you are thinking about a campaign where either you are promoting an event or sending out an offer or just talking about your business in general.

The first step is of course getting your messaging nailed. In other words, we start by attempting to answer the who, what, when, & why :

• Who’s my audience?
• Why should they be interested in this particular offer/ event/news?
• What message worked with them in the past?
• What channels should I be focusing on?
• What time line am I thinking of?
• What are my goals?
• How do I drive the above audience towards these goals?
• What’s my call to action?

Next we turn to the “ how”  . With the call to action in place  , we need to drive a multi-channel or as I like to call it, multi-touch-point campaign. Here’s  just a sample of channels we could use.

Now as I mentioned this is definitely not an exhaustive list of channels. You could additionally rope in videos , word of mouth and then there is of course the press. But not all campaigns and events are press worthy. So you might need to pitch selectively.

Whatever you do, how small or big your campaign is , always think about multi-touch-points and the impact of the collective reach of these channels.

Also, always.. always.. intertwine them !

Post your blog on your facebook and tweet your facebook link. That way you take care of 3 touch points at the same time. Do the same with any LinkedIn group you are part of .

Specific campaign email blasts should include your social media links, be tagged correctly for conversion attribution and be directed to a special landing page on your web site. The web site absolutely must have a full or a partial page dedicated for the campaign.

The print piece of the campaign should tie in seamlessly with your online marketing in terms of messaging and having the social media sites listed. However, due to the higher cost involvement with print, target it to your best performing list and leave the rest of the audience in the hands of web. Trust me, they’ll be well taken care of .

If you are running a paid campaign, make sure to include an adgroup with ads reflecting the campaign message. Have it land on the campaign page of your website. I wouldn’t worry too much about SEO at this point. All the cross links coming in from different channels and the rich quality of your content is taking care of your organic ranking in the background.

Running multi-touch campaigns of course has its own challenges. The  biggest one is the amount of logistics involved. It’s critical & imperative to tie them in a timely fashion. The other big one is the conversion attribution by channel for ROI purposes. But that’s a different discussion altogether.

At the end of the day , the ROI justifies all labor.

Now it’s your turn.. How much of this are you doing? What are the challenges? Are you going beyond? Tell us all about it.

We’ll also be talking about all of this and more at the 1^st Annual Vermont Web Marketing Summit , right here in beautiful Burlington, amidst the dazzling fall colors in September.

Hope to see you all there.

Best,

Bibi



Building and Tracking Emails with Link Tagging

I recently launched Curve Trends Marketing website. One of the channels I am considering for announcing the launch is an email campaign. Almost all of the businesses I work with or know of, continue to adopt this time tested channel, be it for newsletters, new offers or even for  product launch/event announcement.

A big challenge we face as analysts while analyzing email performance for clients is the lack of proper link tagging. So, while drafting the email newsletter, I thought, why not address this as I build the link tags.

What is email link tagging & why do them

Tracking email campaign performance in Web Analytics is done using a process called link tagging.  A typical email contains between five to unlimited number of links. The primary goal of these  links is pretty much the same. They are all directed to a landing page, which more often than not is a page on your website. The tagging also enables you to associate all visitor actions (like conversions and transactions) with the email.

Let’s look at this sample link..

http://www.curvetrends.com/

If someone clicks on it and lands on the home page, I would never know who they are, where they came from, and more importantly, why are they on this page .

So, here’s I how am going to tag it :

http://www.curvetrends.com/?utm_source=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement-list1&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement

Once the email is deployed and someone clicks on this link, the resulting url will be not just  http://www.curvetrends.com/ but the whole phrase above. This is also a good way to test your links to see if they are tagged before you send out your email.

How to do what I just did

As you can see, I added a bunch of additional info to the URL. They’re called link tagging parameters. The name of the parameter is on the left side of the equal sign and the value of the parameter is on the right side.

utm_medium=email
utm_source=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement-list1
utm_campaign=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement

Now let’s try and explain the logic and the process behind building each of these parameters.

utm_medium

The medium tells us what platform the visitor selected to come to the website. I always prefer using “email”. It’s easy and simple and does it’s job. I never recommend adding any extra value or description to this. As you’ll see later, using a single value “email” simplifies the process of consolidating all emails into one line item for reporting purposes.

utm_source

Let me try and simplify the best way to define a source so as not to complicate things during reporting. Always and I insist on this.. always start with the date of the email , followed by the name of the list.Think about it in terms of who you are sending this email to and the date. For example, some of you might choose to send a certain newsletter to just your customers. In that case you can name it as

utm_source=02-25-2010-xxxnewsletter-customer-list.

Others might want to segment their list differently. But you get the point. Assign the date & whom you are sending to as your source value.

utm_campaign

Think of the marketing campaign that the email is a part of.In this instance, it’s my website’s launch.

utm_campaign=02-25-2010-curvetrends-launch-announcement

Keep in mind that a campaign has several different medium. Email is just one of them. Paid ad , a banner on your website or a press release could be several other parts of that campaign. One thing I would make sure is that all of these have the same campaign name, so that you can club them together while reporting for performance evaluation.

utm_content

There is another parameter that I have not used here is the utm_content.You can choose to use utm_content when there are more than one versions of the email. For example, if I choose to offer two different discounts for the same audience and try to test which works better, I’ll use utm_content. These would be then my two versions of the content:

utm_content= 02-25-2010-one_month_free_analytics_report.

utm_content =02-25-2010-300_off_first_month_invoice

But unless you really have a lot of content variations to test, this could be an overkill in terms of data capture.

utm_term

This is another parameter that I have not added as it is relevant for those of you who are spending on paid advertising. Take the top paid keywords ( unbranded) from your web analytics report and plug them here. If the email is on a product, focus on the top paid keywords on that particular product.

What is a good resource to actually help build these tags

I would recommend using Google’s free URL builder as a very good starting point.

Just use the above logic to fill in the values. For example, in the campaign source, I am going to fill in the value : 02-25-2010-xxxnewsletter-customer-list. Same with others.

The Fun Part- Reporting

Why fun? Because all the above values you added , will now get pulled into your analytics report .You would actually be seeing them and analyzing the performance of your campaign based on those values.

I always start with the campaign. After all, email is almost always part of the bigger campaign.

This report lists all the values of your utm_campaign parameters. Now select the name of the campaign that your email was part of and then select medium. You will see a list of medium that was part of this particular campaign including email.

In this case we only used one medium (email) for the campaign.

You can then click on the email to get the source and content details for this particular campaign.

Speaking of details, you want to understand not only visits, pages/visit and/or average time on site but also conversion metrics. They are available in the goal tab. The above account is an instance of a non-ecommerce site. For sites with ecommerce, you can also find out the amount of sales, net revenue and finally the ROI of this campaign in a third tab named Ecommerce. Sweet!

Make sure to combine the above with the metrics provided by your email provider. Metrics like open, unsubscribe, click through, and bounce rates.

Now, enjoy your new found power and utilize it to its potential. Let us know if you are able to leverage the benefits. Have you done anything different in the past? If so, how? For those of you who are already tagging links, please share your experience with us.

Best,

-Bibi

Google’s Advertising Grant for Non-Profits

Today I am writing for a different reason. My goal is to draw the attention of all non-profit organizations out there, regarding available advertising grants from Google. Google defines it as “unique in-kind donation program awarding free AdWords advertising to select charitable organizations which can be used it in a variety of ways, including general outreach, fundraising activities, and recruitment of volunteers.” It goes a long way for non-profits by helping them promote their websites via advertising on Google. About 70% of web searches happen on Google. So it is one of the most powerful online medium to advertise your organization’s goals & objectives.

Google explains the program very clearly here. But in case you feel lost going through all pages of information, here are some questions that came up during my brief discussions with a few non-profits so far and I’ve attempted to break them down and simplify it for the more general audience.

What is advertising with Google ?

For  those of you not aware of how to advertise with Google, there is a platform called Google Adwords that utilizes any search done on keywords related to your organization and serves your ad next to relevant Google search results under the Sponsored Links section. A click on your ad takes users directly to your website.

So, instead of looking for an audience, you pretty much have audience looking for because you’ve created a relevant ad and chosen relevant keywords to describe your efforts!

The ads on the top & the sides are all paid ads. You can see how in the above instance Expedia ads have been served against a search term “travel”. The organic search results are on the left hand side. But since Expedia also spends on Google Advertising through Google Adwords, the ads are served as sponsored links. Once someone clicks on the sponsored links, Expedia will have to pay for that click. Hence the name Pay-Per-Click (PPC). In this example Expedia was bidding on the keyword “travel”. All such bid managements, ad copy creation, keyword selection & insertions, as well as any campaign management for online advertising on Google is done through Adwords.  There are several ways to optimally manage spend and attract conversions from Adwords bid management. One of them is local targeting. Local targeting could be ideal for local non-profits to narrow down on their audience.

Why would Google give away money?

Here it is in Google’s own words-  “Google Grants is a unique in-kind donation program awarding free AdWords advertising to select charitable organizations. We support organizations sharing our philosophy of community service to help the world in areas such as science and technology, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, and the arts.”

How much is the grant ?

• Once selected, your organization can receive up to $329 per day fund allocation for spending on Adwords, thus receiving up to $10000 per month in free advertising, without having to pay any amount to Google.
• If your account consistently reaches the $10,000 per month cap, you may be eligible to apply for a $40,000 per month cap with additional services.

How long does it take for Google to approve or reject the application?

Once your application has been submitted, Google will confirm if you are eligible and start to review your application. As per Google’s website, they inform the applicants within “four months or less” whether or not you will receive a Google Grant award.

How long will the funds be available?

Google requires organizations to be actively engaged in their Google Grants AdWords account. As long as your organization is actively managing the account, adhering to the program guidelines, and making the most of the award, you shall continue to remain in the Google Grants program. There is no set end date for your grant and no need to re-apply at any time.

Who is eligible?

Organizations must have current 501(c)(3) status, as assigned by the Internal Revenue Service, to be considered for a Google Grant.

Eligible non-profits include, but are not limited to, organizations that serve communities in art, education, health, science & technology, and volunteerism.

Ineligible non-profits include, but are not limited to, those whose websites or missions are identified in the “Restrictions” below.

Restrictions

• Commercial / Goods and Services
  • Car, boat and real estate donation websites
  • Websites with a primary focus on selling goods, products or services
  • Organizations generating more than 50% earned, commercial revenue
  • Consumer credit counseling
• Communities and Groups
  • Programs requiring membership and/or providing benefit solely to members, such as clubs, sports teams, alumni, networking and other membership organizations
  • Religious content or proselytizing on website as well as organizations that use religion or sexual orientation as factor in hiring or populations served
  • Groups serving a primarily political function such as lobbying, think tanks and special interests
• Other
  • Promotion of illegal or disruptive tactics
  • Websites serving solely as a portal or directory
  • Websites participating in Google AdSense program

Our non-profit is very small compared to the size of some other non-profits in the Country or even the State we are in. So why would Google even consider us?

There are currently no trends in terms of types or sizes of non-profits availing the grants and is dependent on a number of variables. Size or extent of reach or money power of a non-profit doesn’t seem to be included in that list.

Is there any value with advertising online since we cater to a demography where web is not a popular medium?

Any advertisement is most effective when targeted to the decision makers. It does not necessarily have to be the same audience that you serve as a non-profit. Think about who takes the decision on their behalf. Majority of the time it’s somebody else other than the exact demography you are serving. It makes a lot more sense to target your ads to the decision makers, who are, in all probability, looking for constant information to make the right decision and will click on your ads if they are relevant to their needs.

How to apply?

• Here is the application form .
• You will know that your application was received when you see a “Thank you” page and receive an automated verification email from Google.
• Your application is more likely to be successful if you have a basic understanding of Google Grants and Google AdWords. Ask for outside consultant help if you feel the need. It’s completely worth it. ( Full disclosure – We manage Adwords accounts on behalf of several organizations through Curve Trends Marketing)
• In your application, you’ll be asked to provide sample keywords, ad copy, and a brief statement about how your organization will benefit from participating in the Google Grants program.

My earnest hope is that all non-profits who are forced to cut back on their reach and hence the good work they deliver , due to shrinking or non-available marketing budget, will avail this grant and make the most of it to deliver the best possible results to those who need it the most.

With hope,

Bibi

SEO For Non-Experts

There is an overflow of “to dos” and “how tos” on SEO these days. Somehow, I always feel that these posts from the experts or the gurus are primarily addressed to either a web designer or  a search marketing expert. They are great posts – no doubts about it, but somehow doesn’t address the common folks- the business owner or that custom jewelry designer or even the painter/artist/ financial expert or even the lawyer who  has a great website or so they think but just don’t know how to best get themselves found by their target audience without spending tons of dollars.

Here’s something I always share with my clients prior to kicking off a discussion on SEO. Think of Search Engines as non-intelligent ( read stupid) middle men . You have to keep them happy and at the same time provide a very simple version of your products & services to have them take it to your users. Any false move or complicated offerings and you fall out of favor.

Also, the sole purpose of your website’s SEO is to have your target audience find you and once they do, to provide them with relevant information. Please never tie in SEO with attaining the no. 1 rank in Google. That is one big wrong assumption you’ll ever make. During the process of SEO, if you manage to get to the top, that’ll be sweet . But if you follow the basic SEO principles, there is no reason for you to not get into the first page for any relevant search.

So here’s a few simple ways to serve your offering to your middlemen ( read Search Engines) in order to have them take your website to your target audience.

1. PAGE TITLES– A page title tells the user but more importantly the Search Engine, in a few words what the website is all about. Here’s an example of how a title is served for a website ( www.pinkribbon.com) for a search against “pink ribbon”. Ideally, one should always create a unique title for each page on their site. Also titles should be brief & very relevant to the business.

Here’s how  your designer will build your title code:

<title>Pink Ribbon (Official Website) International Breast Cancer Awareness and Funding</title>

Now, notice how the page title is served. Very long page titles tend to get cropped off. It’s always optimal to use between 7-9 words for page titles.

2.URLs –  An URL is your web address. www.mycompany.com is your home page url  and then for different pages you have an extension of your home page url . For example www.mycompany.com/product1.htm is the url for your first product and www.mycompany.com/aboutus.htm is the url for the about us page.

• My golden rule – keep your url simple & logical, something which the users can memorize after looking at it once.

• Use words in your url instead of number or in other words instead of www.mycompany.com/ page1.htm , use www. mycompany.com/seo-basics.htm and make it relevant to the information provided on the page.

• Use dash instead of underscore to connect any words in your url . So instead of www.mycompany.com/ lifestyle_products_for_women .htm use www.mycompany.com/lifestyle-products-for-women.htm. According to Matt Cutts , the head of Google’s Webspam team , search engines just like it better. Let’s keep it at that.

• Use one version of an url to reach any page. If you find users are using different urls to reach the same page on your website, have your web designer set up a what is called 301 redirect to your preferred url. That way all urls pointing to the same content get redirected to just 1 master url that you think is the most relevant to that page.

3. WRITE UNIQUE DESCRIPTIONS FOR EACH PAGE ON YOUR WEBSITE

Let’s first look at how page descriptions appear to your audience when they search for you. The text under the title , known in the  technical world as “snippet” is basically the description of the page of your website that is served against a query. In this case the query was “ Spain Vacation”.

And here’s the code for it that you’ll have your web designer build. Note, how too long a description tends to get cropped off. Once more, keep your descriptions simple, short & relevant to the page.

<meta name="description" content="Spain holiday rentals.
Villas, apartments and country homes for rent in Spain
.Spain holiday lettings in Spanish holiday homes in
Spanish villas in Spain holiday Accommodation
for rent in Malaga,Alicante,Barcelona,Costa del
Sol,Costa Blanca,Costa Brava and mallorca" />

4. EASY NAVIGATION –

• Have a text based navigation for your users. Avoid creating complex navigation links like linking every page to every other page on the website.

• It’ s a good idea to control navigation from page to page using text links instead of images. Avoid website navigation through images, animations or drop down menus. Sometimes search engines do not handle flash or javascript very well. A simple sitemap page with links to all of the pages on your site is very useful.

• Have your website designers create “an XML Sitemap File” for your site. The XML sitemap file will help to ensure that search engines discover the pages on your site. Please make sure there are no broken links on your sitemap. Create a breadcrumb navigation.

• A breadcrumb navigation is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to see the path of navigation and quickly navigate back to a previous section or the home page. Here’s how a bread crumb navigation looks like

• Customized error page – Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn’t exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL. It’s called a “ 404 error “.Having a custom 404 page that directs users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user’s experience. Try & use humor for the 404 error page. Somehow humor helps to heal any bruised feelings. Here are 100 ideas on funny & unusual 404 error pages.

5. PROMOTE YOUR WEBSITE

• Paid search is the SEO marketing option over which you have the most control. Though by no means it’s a requirement for good SEO , it’s an attractive option to have available to you. The vast majority of businesses do best when they use a holistic approach to SEO, combining elements of organic and paid search with a healthy dose of good writing & usability.

• Do not forget your offline promotions – your print collaterals, business cards , any other printed mailings should always have your web URL printed.

• Social media – utilize the social media engagement opportunities. Get into twitter, facebook and blogs. A few words of caution though :

i.      Do not publicize everything & anything that’s happening at your end. Feed quality updates on these forums. It’s easy to get lost.
ii.      Do not do it for the sake of  doing it. Jump in only if you can sustain the inertia. It’s nothing worse than a twitter page with no updates in 6 months or a blog with no entries in the last year maybe. I see that happening with a lot of companies and it makes me very nervous.

6. CONTENT IS KING – The entire process of web search is text based. The search engines care for how much text you have on your site, how it’s formatted & of course how relevant it is to your business goals and the product on that page. Your site’s text needs to be compelling, clear, focused and directed to your users. It also needs to be formatted so that the search engines can read it. Designing your site around your visitors’ needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

7. KEYWORD SELECTION & PLACEMENT IS CRITICAL. It works when used for usability purpose over the entire site rather than stuffing it in your title or page description. There are multitude of free keyword tools available to help you select the relevant keywords for your target audience. Keep them in mind when creating or revising your content. I am a huge fan of Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool.

8. LINKS PLAY A CRUCIAL ROLE – Search Engines are hugely fond of links. Links that exist on your website can be broken down as Internal links –are how you connect different sections of your web site. External links – where you connect to contents in other websites.For both cases, use quality anchor text to link the content. An anchor text should provide some information on what the link is all about. Avoid using texts like “ click here” , “click this page” or “click this article”.
Here’s how anchor text is built by your designers . Please note, how a good anchor text has a phrase related to the content it’s linking to.
<a href=”http://mycompany.com/seo-basics.htm”&gt; Here are the SEO basics </a>

9. OPTIMIZE THE IMAGES ON YOUR WEB SITE :

Images like text needs to be optimized for Search Engines & better user experience. Here’s a check list for the right image usage in your website:

• • Make sure all images on your website have not only a distinct name but an alt tag . The “alt” tag allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. If a user is viewing your site on a browser that doesn’t support images, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.

• Make sure your web designer use brief, but descriptive filenames and alt text. Avoid using file names like pic1.jpg or image1.gif. Describe them wherever possible. Same with alt tags. Use short & descriptive tags. Do not stuff keywords in your tags or image file names.

10. MEASURE YOUR EFFORTS– I am a big fan of measurement. Try to get insights into how users reach and behave on your site. Use a free tool like Google Analytics to
• Discover the most popular content on your site
• Measure the impact of optimizations you make to your site
Here’s a post I wrote on my blog on how your business goals should be aligned with insights drawn from your web analytics.

Search engines deal with every page individually. So each landing page will need to be optimized for overall optimization of your site. However, just make sure you don’t go too crazy with this strategy, or it will have the reverse effect and get flagged as spam.  Keep in mind that moderation is always good when it comes to SEO!
Does this help you to get started? Do you monitor your results? How has your optimization affected your business goals? Please share it with us.
Till then,
Happy Optimizing!
-Bibi

Are Your Business Goals Aligned with Insights drawn from Your Web Analytics?

The world of online marketing is evolving fast and 2010 promises to be explosive in terms of social media engagement. The extent of accurate measurement of these efforts is going to play a major deciding role in differentiating all business successes. Measuring your web engagements , be it the website or the social media efforts, isn’t about the volume; it’s about identifying the critical few performance indicators that aligns with your goals, assists with insights and eventually drives the business forward.

Web Analytics is the biggest weapon available to businesses of all size in their battle for insights. Yet, while currently about 70% of consumers are shopping online at least once, researches have revealed that nearly 60% of the businesses still under utilize this critical power house of online customer information. The biggest data management revolution in recent years has happened in the form of free Analytics tools from Google & Yahoo. A lot more followed, but Google Analytics still commands the major market share due to the simplicity of its installation and constantly expanding robust reporting features.

I have always been a huge fan of simple & holistic approach to solutions.

Here’s a basic 4 step analysis model I’ve been following for quite some time and currently implement at Curve Trends Marketing. This has more than enabled me to gain business insights and action on :

• Prospect Acquisition, Retention & Conversion
• Nurture Existing Customers

while deriving outcomes in terms of

• Lower Costs
• Increased Revenue
• Improved Customer Experience

Step 1 – Assess the Current State of your Business	Gain  Insights and Action on a) Prospect Acquisition, Retention & Conversion b) Nurture Existing Customers	Step 2- Identify  goals, establish benchmarks & report on basic key metrics that drives visitor behavior
Step 4 – Answer the “Why” in Customer Behavior – Qualitative Analysis , Usability Testing & Competitive Analysis	Derive Outcomes a) Lower Costs b) Increased Revenue c) Improved Customer Experience	Step 3- Customize  the “Critical Few” actionable “Key Performance Indicators” Dashboard  that is Unique to Your Goals & Your Customers

If you are currently new to the concept of Web Analytics tools or just getting acquainted with customer behavior through click stream analysis, you might want to start taking those tiny incremental steps of establishing your basic metrics first.

BASIC METRICS Visitors & Unique Visits Bounce Rates Exit Rate Sources Of Traffic Popular Content & Landing pages

But once you are ready to dive deeper into your customer world, it becomes imperative that you start pursuing the advanced segmentation & analysis.

No advanced analysis can be complete without understanding the “why” in customer behavior. Why did they come to your web site? Why did they react the way they did? Why did they leave? Did they get confused with the layout? What were they crazy about? Customer surveys, benchmarking, A/B testing (where you test 2 different versions of the web page) are some common channels for answering these questions. Capturing the voice of customer (VOC), will enhance your user experience & improve customer satisfaction.

ADVANCED ANALYSIS Segmentation Understanding Intent of Visit Customized Traffic Source Analysis Multichannel Measurement Including Offline Efforts & Social Media Campaigns

They say “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”. Unless you understand the modus operandi of your competition, you will not be able to set yourself apart. Competitive Intelligence helps to understand industry trends that integrates with the insights derived from Web Analytics and enhances your outcomes. There are several free tools including Google’s Insights for Search available to help you accomplish your competitive analysis.

Whatever you do, always remember the key to your success lies with identifying your unique Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), for objectives you have set for your online actions, before starting to monitor and measure them.

Still unsure? Or are you already an Analytics Ninja? Let us know your role and how you are leveraging this powerful tool to drive your business.

Wishing you a safe ,successful & measurable 2010!

-Bibi

Local Businesses – Cut Your Marketing Costs Through Location Targeting

Recently, I was at a breakfast session with a bunch of fellow Vermonters. During the course of  small group discussions, a question from a local business owner hit me hard. He was wondering if online marketing can help him to pitch his ads to a target audience within a specific periphery of his business. Currently, he does it with direct mail to a targeted list select. This, of course is costly , time consuming and unless one has the right tracking code and a circulation analyst on board, it’s hard to  match back conversions to the specific mailing, or measure  the efforts. As a result, the ROI tends to look miserable…and of course, now this business has pretty much lost the motivation to send out another piece of that print mail.

In several of my recent communications, I have been talking about online location targeting.  According to a report from BIA/Kensley ,the locally bought portion of the market, which primarily comprises small and medium-sized businesses, will grow from $45 million in 2008 to $565 million by 2013. The market share of these small & medium businesses for localized ad targeting is expected to swell from 5% to 30% of the overall ad spend  during the same period.

This might be a good time to speak to it a little bit more in detail since that’s one of my core interest areas and a special focus for Curve Trends Marketing.

WHAT IS LOCATION TARGETING AND WHO SHOULD DO IT?

Location targeting allows businesses who cater to regional customers  to reach out to their audience through an online campaign using a combination of locations, including countries, territories, regions, cities and custom areas. Additionally, Google also allows advertisers to further expand their reach. Advertisers can now bundle ( group countries or territories) , specify a radius around a point on the map , or simply define out a custom shape on the map  for their ads to appear.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

These targeted ads appear alongside Google search results pages to users in the specified locations. As a small Vermont business owner, I might choose to show my ads in & around 30 miles of Burlington, Vermont and  45 Miles of Sunnyvale California , since my business capabilities are limited to these 2 cities and their specified surrounding areas. I could even choose a custom area if I know that’s where my customer base lies.The image below is an example of custom area selected by an advertiser. His ads will be shown against searches for related  keywords exactly within this defined area.

Here’s how it works : Mr. JS owns  a locally made shoe business in Vermont. He’s giving a 25% discount till the middle of January to clear out some of his inventory and opts for location targeting of “Vermont”.  He also wants to target prospects searching with the keyword “shoe” or “ holiday discount”. When prospective customer in Vermont searches for “ shoes “, JS’s ads are served. His ads are also shown when someone in New Jersey wants to send a pair of  “Vermont made shoes” for the “holidays” to his parents in California.

You may ask how Google does it. In the first case, Google uses the person’s Internet Protocol ( IP) address to determine the location and serves the local ad. For the next one, Google uses the location information “Vermont”  in the search query to serve the relevant ad.

HOW DOES LOCAL BUSINESSES SAVE MONEY?

Having served locally as opposed to being targeted across the entire nation or demography, they tend to be cheaper and cost per click works out lower than similar ads without specified location.

Unlike print ads,

a) You can set your budget for online campaigns and never be able to exceed it ( Google won’t let you)

b) Tweak your ad copies as frequently as you choose to improve  click through rates as well as conversions.. and..

c) Set your specific goals and measure it more accurately with Adwords reporting.

Simple, Targeted, Measurable – Key to any Marketing Campaign Success!

That’s what makes this tool one of my favorites.

Now it’s your turn. Have you tried this tool? What are your experiences? Do you have any concerns?

Let  us know.

Here’s wishing you & your family a wonderful & a relaxing holiday!

-Bibi