Search Engine Marketing
Behaviourally Targeted Online Ads…On the Rise!
Check out the eMarketer’s forecast as summarized by the fabulous daily, CynopsisDigital. Based on our team’s experience and success using behaviourally targeted online ads, this trend makes perfect sense. Still, the numbers are staggering.
“Assuming that privacy concerns are adequately addressed, behavioral targeting will generate more than $1 billion in ad sales in the U.S this year, according to a forecast from eMarketer, with that number more than doubling to $2.6 billion by 2014. Behaviorally targeted ad dollars will rise as a proportion of online display spending from 14.2% in 2010 to nearly 20% by 2014, when ads targeted based on interests or intentions will account for 7.6% of total US online ad spending.
U.S. Behavioral Targeting Online Advertising Spending 2008-2014 (millions)
Year Spending % Change
2008 $775 47.6%
2009 $925 19.4%
2010 $1,125 21.6%
2011 $1,350 20.0%
2012 $1,700 25.9%
2013 $2,100 23.5%
2014 $2,600 23.8%
Source: eMarketer”
- Moyra
Tags: ad spending, behavioural advertising, online advertising, online marketing, PPC, SEM
ALERT! 5 Steps To Creating and Maintaining A Successful Online Presence
I’m an information junkie. I read almost everything I can get my eyes on if it relates to a topic of interest – social media, television, online marketing, cooking, travel, raising a toddler. Of course the problem is, there’s way more information than there is time.
A similar challenge faces businesses today. There are far more online marketing opportunities than time and money to support them. On one hand, it’s an embarrassment of riches. On the other, it’s a pain in the posterior for businesses trying to decide which tools will deliver the greatest ROI.
When I step into a bookstore, sometimes I “lose it.” My pulse quickens as I roam from section to section grabbing books I want to read that instant. Many of these books litter my home office waiting for me to crack their covers. The reality is, I can’t get to them all, just like I can’t get to every blog, forum and tweet.
Some businesses are “losing it,” too. I’m watching as they dabble with Twitter, Facebook, blogs, social bookmarking, and shiny apps that grab their attention. Trouble is, companies sometimes sew the seeds and forget to water them. They sit dormant, like my stacks of books.
For some reason, quite likely a combination of reasons actually, businesses are experimenting online without applying much thought or resources. When it comes to building an online presence, I’m all for experimentation. In fact, it’s necessary. But, that doesn’t mean playing fast and loose with your brand.
Perhaps it’s because many CEOs still dismiss the Internet as a frivolous frontier where their teenagers hang out and play games, where singles search for mates, serious types read news, and a whole lot of people watch porn. Perhaps, when it comes to engaging customers online, the barriers to entry are so low and so unregulated that it’s too far outside the costly and complex world of traditional marketing and advertising to make these opportunities seem credible … or comfortable. Whatever the reason, after fifty years of business obsessing about brand, it is remarkable that so many companies are throwing caution to the wind and jumping online without so much as a whiff of a plan.
That’s why we created A.L.E.R.T. It’s an acronym that spells out the five steps to creating and maintaining a successful online strategy. It’s a philosophy and for the Magnify team, a comprehensive system.
The core concept goes like this …
A.L.E.R.T. – ASSESS. LOCATE. ENGAGE. RESPOND. TRACK.
Assess – You need to know where you stand before you can figure out where you are going. This stage is all about figuring out what people online are saying about your brand, product or service, and what the conversations are about your competitors. It usually means paying attention to how users are finding and interacting with your website, too. And the websites of your competitors.
Locate – Where is your audience hanging out online? Once you start to find them, listen. Learn where they cluster, what matters to them, and how they like to engage in terms of platforms and communication style.
Engage – This is literally and figuratively the pivot point. It’s the most creative and often the most comprehensive part of the plan. How are you going to engage your target market? A paid advertising campaign? A simple blog? An aggressive Twitter and Facebook strategy? Quirky or eye-popping video? Games? Quizzes? All of the above? Whatever the plan, ensure you have the resources to make it thrive.
Respond – Listen more than you speak. It’s not a bad mantra for life and a darn good rule of thumb online. Monitor what is being said about your brand online. When someone asks a question, offers a compliment or throws a flame, a timely and authentic response can go a long way toward turning feedback into opportunities and critics into champions.
Track – Be sure to track your results each month. Dig into Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and the myriad other free monitoring tools. The only way to ensure ROI is to pay attention to the trends. Tweak the initiatives that aren’t working and amp up the ones that are.
Whether your company sells shoes or dreams, this process will help you build and maintain a successful online presence. It pays to be ALERT!
- Moyra
Tags: Business, facebook, internet marketing, online marketing, ROI, Social Media, Twitter
How to optimize a currently running Adwords campaign?
Google Adwords Campaign Optimization
Professional advertisers don’t just publish ads and hope they will work. Yes, some ideas come from creativity and brainstorming sessions, but, in my opinion, the best campaigns are the ones that are tweaked using mathematical techniques.
Today we will explore the challenger/recruit concept. The main idea is simple: at any time in your campaign, you should always have two variations of your best ads running. Why? It is rare that a new concept will work perfectly out of the box. Reasons are that the public might not react exactly the way you expected or worse, a competitor started his campaign with a similar ad and you lost your distinctive concept.
Ads resulting from this technique will be slow incremental improvements? based on market response. Let’s say for example your best ad is “Most practical product, click here”. You should cut 20% of its budget and reallocate the money into a new slightly different ad for example: “Most practical product, buy here”. Run the recruit for a few days and if it’s performing better than the challenger, replace it.
One difficulty can be determining how many impressions you need before making a decision. Ads should run for a minimum of 1 week to eliminate the effect of week days i.e. if your ad contains the word “coffee”, it might be more popular on Monday hehe. Also, be careful of special holidays. There is no absolute rule on the number of impressions you should base your decision on, however, a good rule of thumb is about 200 impressions per day for the monitoring period.
eMarketing strategist
Tags: adwords, google, PPC campaign, PPC optimization, SEM
Market segmentation with Google Analytics
If you have your own website or blog, you are probably using Google Analytics to analyse your traffic statistics, perhaps because it’s free, easy to use and very reliable. Google recently launched the “Advanced Segment” feature which allows you to create subcategories of users. If you’re asking yourself “Why would I do that?”, I might have an answer…
Different segment of users have different habits, look for different content, or are using different features. For example, Seth Godin found on his blog that while only 25% of his readers were using Firefox, they produced twice as much content as Internet Explorer users. In this case, it would make sense, for example, to focus on Firefox optimisation when working on new features to add content.
Another example: you are running an Adwords campaign and want to optimize your landing page for a specific targeted group of visitors. Just create a segment for the traffic coming from Adwords and watch what actions they take. Do they all click on a specific image, link? On what page do they exit? Then modify your content accordingly, wait for new data to accumulate in Analytics, and finally rinse and repeat until you have reached your goals.
Here is how to do it. In Analytics, on the left menu, go to Advanced Segment. Create a new segment and just drag and drop your criteria. Save it and go back to Analytics.
Now, when viewing a specific page, you can specify the segment you want to isolate and use all the regular Analytics features, while comparing your different segments.
eMaketing Strategist
Tags: actionable web analytics, advanced segmentation, analyzing website outcomes, brand segmentation, Google Analytics, market segmentation, web metrics analysis
SEO for WordPress Sites
There’s no denying that WordPress is a platform that makes it easier for companies and individuals to publish, update and manage blogs and sites. However, for all its advantages, there are a few points that count against WordPress, when it is interpreted by search engines. In this post, I pinpoint some of these issues, and how to address them:
Photo credit: Randy Stewart, via Flickr
Potential Duplicate Content
One of the great things about WordPress blogs is that they make it dead-simple for a visitor to find the post that he/she is interested in. The visitor can select articles to read according to category, keywords (tags) and authors. Unfortunately, this means that all posts that are organized by those criteria end up being duplicated in one way or another. For example, let’s suppose that Jane writes an insightful article about Ferraris, and chooses to file that post under the “Italian Imports” category, as well as using the tags “Ferrari” and “Testarossa”, right before filing it under her own author name – “Jane”. Consequently, that article will be found not just in one page, but anytime someone chooses to view posts within the “Italian Imports” category, the “Ferrari” or “Testarossa” tags, or that were written by Jane. Hence you have the issue of several pages containing duplicate text – a “no-no” in Google’s eyes, since it views duplicate content as an illegal attempt by Webmasters to inflate a site’s search engine rankings. These sites often end up with a lower position among search results.
One way to avoid this common problem is to ensure that there’s a large distinction between your tag and category archives. So, as an example, you don’t want to have both a category AND a tag to be called “Italian Imports”. A good rule of thumb is to assign larger subjects and topics as categories, and leave tags for nuances of those topics. So in our example above, we could choose “Italian Imports” and “Ferrari” to be categories, while setting “Testarossa” and “Pininfarina” as tags.
Optimized Description and Keyword Tags
When you publish your WordPress blog right “out of the box”, description and keywords meta tags are not automatically included in your posts. That’s not a bad thing, though. Although keyword tags are not as useful in search engine optimization as they once were, description tags are still used by search engines to decide on how they describe your pages in search engine results. As such, an effective description plays an important effect on whether someone will click on your link among many other search engine listings. You definitely want your words to be compelling and separate your listing from the rest of the pack. Each page on your site should have a unique description tag since, optimally, everyone of your Web pages should be distinct from others. How do you work around this WordPress shortcoming? You need to resort to a WordPress SEO plugin.
Two main plugins that facilitate the optimization of a WordPress site are “Headspace 2” and “All in One SEO“. They both have their own advantages. “All in One SEO” makes it easier to formulate title and description tags for a site, but since the description and title tags that it composes are somewhat automated, this plugin does not grant you as much control on the text on those tags as you might like.
If you’re more of an SEO control-freak like me, and want to be picky about how your page descriptions show up in search results, then “Headspace 2″ may be a better fit. That is because this plugin doesn’t automatically compose meta title and meta description tags – so you can enter copy and keywords that you know are bound to generate the most clicks for you.
Google XML Sitemaps
WordPress sites allow for new content to be added, easily and painlessly. However, as far as Google is concerned, if it is not aware that you have new content on your site, then it’s all for naught. You want to notify Google that there’s new material on your WordPress blog, and one of the easiest ways to do so is by installing a plugin that will automatically generate an XML Google Sitemap for your blog as new content is developed. Some of the many plugins available are:
This is another major step in optimizing your WordPress site which will make it that much easier for Google to take notice of your blog.
PageRank Dilution
Links pointing to someone else’s site from within your own blog dilute your own PageRank. For that reason, you will want to be very specific and strategic about where in your site an outbound link can be counted as an endorsement from your blog (hence helping the landing site’s PageRank) or, in contrast, which areas of your site carry no PageRank value for links posted there. A helpful hint is to add the “nofollow” attribute to any links to which you do not want to give any “PageRank power”.
Because of their social nature, blogs can have a plethora of outbound links. One way to manage how much PageRank juice you want to giveaway from your blog is by installing a “nofollow” plugin, which will enable you to dictate which of your site sections have “nofollow” or “dofollow” tags in their links. As an example, you can choose for all links in your post pages to have a “nofollow” attribute attached to them, while all links in tag archives would receive the “dofollow” accreditation. This plays a part at conserving your PageRank, since you’re communicating to the Google Crawler that outbound links on specific pages are not to be countered as endorsements (which dilutes that page’s PageRank).
For a list of nofollow plugins, check out this link.
SEO-Friendly Permalink Settings
A permalink (an abbreviation of “permanent links”) is the URL that WordPress designates to a blog post, and which is then used by other sites to link back to that article. It’s also the link that you’d email to a friend, or that you’d bookmark, if you desire to access that post a later date.
By default, permalinks assigned by WordPress are neither “human” or “SEO” friendly. Typically, a permalink looks like this:
http://www.yourwordpressbloghere.com/?p=22
Try saying that, three times, fast! Good luck. In addition, an article will be much more conducive to success in search engines if its permalink resembles more my example below:
http://www.yourwordpressbloghere.com/2009/06/why-ferrari-testarossa-rocks
The process to change your posts’ URLs to a better permalink varies depending on the WordPress version that you’re using. It may be as easy as installing a plugin and making any changes through that tool, or it may require some modifications to be made on a server level. Either way, it’s worth the trouble.
These are merely some of measures that can be implemented to optimize WordPress sites. They should be employed in tandem with other basic SEO measures.
I hope this helps you in some measure. Of course, your comments and questions are welcome. Is there a topic that you’d like us to discuss here on the Magnify Digital blog? Send it our way!
‘Til next time,
Guacira Naves
Online Marketing Strategist
@OnlineStrategy
Tags: WordPress, WordPress plugins
