PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

MarketingSherpa
MarketingSherpa recently surveyed marketers about their most under-used campaign performance metrics when it came to search, and found that conversions and ROI came out on top.

Over 40% of marketers said that they didn’t track conversions (23%) or ROI (20%) for their search campaigns. It seems that while search has been lauded as one of the most accountable ad channels, a significant number of companies are not maximizing the ability to track it to actual sales (or other conversion action).

“With prices rising steadily, marketers who evaluate search against tangible KPIs will be the ones who will optimize and balance their spending,” the report said.

Search Engine People
So you’ve succeeded in getting your client to blog. And now page views and comments are up, the content is having a great impact on overall SEO–but the client wants to know how the blog can actually impact sales. Jennifer Osborne has been in the same situation, and she offers some tips for converting those readers into buyers.

The blog has to represent a company’s authority or industry expertise if readers are going to trust it enough to pull out their credit cards. “Use your blog to develop a specialty in a particular niche of your industry,” Osborne says.

Blog conversions are also driven by keeping readers in the loop. Tell them where they can find similar content, or a more detailed analysis, or even a video or product demo. “Don’t add new content without thinking about what it relates to,” Osborne says. “Link it to the next step. This will substantially increase your opportunity to convert.”

GigaOm
In a memo to employees about the Yahoo saga, AOL CEO Randy Falco underlines the problem facing social networks: “But despite drawing large, engaged audiences, other social networks have not been able to make the experiences relevant to users and marketers alike.”

Falco hits the nail on the head: social nets want marketers to foot the bill for content that’s specifically tailored to an experience where the user is completely disengaged from marketing messages. Falco thinks that by combining Platform A and Bebo, AOL could fix the problem.. But lumping another company into AOL’s portal and then using an ad network, even a highly targeted one, to serve it ads won’t solve the social networking question. Someone still needs to come up with a way to make social networks more relevant for advertisers.

It’s more than likely going to be a technology solution from a company like ScanScout, whose technology is able to break up, say, a video into tiny segments that it lumps into advertising categories, making sure the piece of content is both advertising-friendly and relevant. Social media sites need technologies like this to extract ad friendly inventory for reticent advertisers.

Over the last decade marketers have come to accept that search is a channel primarily suited to direct response.  Especially in paid search, those investing in search marketing campaigns are generally measuring success based on explicit return-on-investment goals.  Initially, marketers opt for simple success metrics like cost per sale or cost per application.  Eventually, as they get more sophisticated, these marketers embrace metrics more closely linked to campaign — and business — profitability, such as gross margin per sale or customer account value per click.  An entire sub-industry of search analytics and optimization, in fact, has grown up around these metrics.  And by all accounts these measures of search campaign success are widely accepted and appreciated — consider the size of the paid search marketplace as evidence to support this claim.

But more and more marketers are finding out that measuring search as a stand-alone direct response channel does not tell the whole story.  They are finding value intrinsic in search campaigns, like its ability to move brand perceptions, which are not accounted for in their old ROI models.  And they are uncovering more effective optimization techniques through understanding external factors that can impact search marketing success.  In short, search marketers are getting smarter about how they measure and manage successful search campaigns.

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DIRECT ACCESS TRAFFIC–OR VISITORS WHO arrive at a Web site by directly typing in a URL or bookmark–represents some of the most valuable traffic an online retailer can draw in, according to a new study by Engine Ready.

The San Diego-based search marketing firm studied 2 years worth of traffic from 27 clients in its roster, including e-tailers in the CPG, home improvement and clothing categories, and analyzed it in terms of four types of site visitors–direct access, referrals (via links from other Web sites or email), paid search and organic search traffic.

“Visitors arriving via direct access or a bookmark stay longer, view more pages, are more likely to purchase and more likely to spend a higher dollar amount than visitors from other sources,” the report said.

Online retailers that have established a brand presence through either on- or offline efforts are likely the primary sources and beneficiaries of this direct access traffic, as they have had the opportunity to wedge their URL into the user’s memory (or at least into their browser’s bookmarks toolbar).

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If you want to promote your product or service, then consider using public relations. The best part of PR is that it costs nothing. In fact, public relations is one of the best kept secrets of small business owners who are successful. Use these powerful techniques to get picked up by local and national media.

1. Be an expert.

The media relies on experts for their information. The news that gets printed is only as credible as the source from which it comes. Begin by selecting a news related story to comment on. It should be a story that you are qualified to speak about, aligned with your area of expertise.

If your background is in engineering, and a building falls down, you are qualified to speak about the structure and answer possible engineering related questions. Being an expert simply means that you have a background in a specific area and can lend your expertise.

2. Research the reporter.

To get coverage, find the reporter who is covering the news you wish to comment on. For example, if the news is about a specific current event, then Google the current event name followed by the name of a popular newspaper like the Wall Street Journal or USA Today. You’ll quickly find the reporters who have written on the subject. Call the newspaper (contact information available on their website) and ask for the reporter by name. If the operation asks what your call is in reference to, simply state that you have information related to a specific news item.
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ALAN KRAUSS

CLIFFORD LERNER knew within minutes of its debut that his newest Facebook application, an online dating service called Are You Interested, was going to be a success.

The server traffic showed that people on Facebook, the social networking site, were installing Are You Interested at a furious clip, Mr. Lerner said. Better still, they were telling their friends.

“We knew immediately that we were onto something,” said Mr. Lerner, chief executive of Snap Interactive, which created Are You Interested.

After its start last August, Snap rose rapidly in the Internet dating world. Less than a year later, Are You Interested and Snap’s other Facebook application, Meet New People, rival the top dating sites, Mr. Lerner contends, without spending money on marketing.

Meet New People was the first Facebook application, or widget, that Mr. Lerner and his four-person company created. It was introduced the week after Facebook opened its network to outside programmers in May 2007.

Its goal was to drive Facebook users to Snap’s stand-alone online dating site, IamFreeTonight.com, which was doing well on the basis of favorable news media attention and its two novel features, immediate gratification (as promised by its name) and an option to set up group dates.

But Facebook proved to be a springboard. Meet New People was soon funneling some 2,000 new members a day to IamFreeTonight — roughly 20 times the stand-alone site’s daily growth rate at that point.

Mr. Lerner, 29, decided to start over, creating a Facebook application that would be independent of the existing Web site. The programmers spent about a month building Are You Interested.

The new widget reached a million installations in its first month; some 8.6 million people have now installed it, according to Adonomics.com.

Measurements of Web traffic are unreliable, but Mr. Lerner says Snap’s application is outpacing established sites like Match.com and Yahoo Personals.

According to data from Google, which helps Web-site owners monitor their traffic, Are You Interested had 6.1 million unique visitors in January and 155 million page views.

“A widget like this is clearly at the sweet spot,” said Barry Parr, a media analyst with Jupiter Research. “It appeals to the right demographic, it’s useful, and it’s also fun.”

Money has begun to come in from advertising. Last month, Snap Interactive reported preliminary fourth-quarter 2007 sales of $388,000. Profitability for the quarter and the year will be released in March.

Being among the first to introduce a Facebook application was certainly an advantage for Snap Interactive, Mr. Parr said.

The question is whether Mr. Lerner can stave off the competition and parlay his company’s early momentum into a winning proposition in the long run.

In general, Mr. Parr said, “there are a lot of smart people and big companies working on widgets.”

Internet marketing strategies involve driving targeted (people who are interested in what you have to offer) traffic to your website, blog, or sales page.

That traffic then has to be converted into sales. This simple formula illustrates this process:

Traffic + Conversions = Sales

Keeping this formula in your mind will help you in your internet marketing efforts because you will realize that you not only have to generate traffic, but also turn those visitors into buyers.

Furthermore, here are 7 basic rules to follow when applying this formula. These rules are relevant to all forms of marketing but are especially important for online marketing where inexperienced people can “burn” a lot of money quickly and become very discouraged.

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Marketing Charts
A Datran Media survey of 2,000 online marketing professionals finds that email, not search, is the best performing online marketing tactic. Eight out of 10 marketers said as much, while 82 percent said they plan to increase email spending in the coming year. Fifty-five percent expect email ROI to be higher than any other online medium.

The data is a little misleading, however, as the question that was put to marketers was, “which advertising media buys perform strongly for your company,” not “which media buy is the most effective.” Nevertheless, search came second, with 70.4 percent describing it as “strong.” Display was third, with 37.6 percent giving it a positive response. Ad networks came fourth with a 34.1 percent response.

Meanwhile, data from the Direct Marketing Association says that email ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008, more than twice the ROI of search and display. The survey also found that 67 percent of respondents said email helped boost sales through other channels.