Google Analytics Upgrade

2007-05-13T21:31:00.000-07:00

On May 8^th, Google announced its first major upgrade to the free Analytics package since the Internet giant acquired Urchin and MeasureMap. Why? Because Google wanted its analytics package to be as intuitively usable to a mid-level marketer as it would be to a senior developer or “mom & pop” wholesaler trying to get a toe hold into an online identity. But before you get too excited, this is a staged roll out; over the next several weeks, Google will be migrating all existing Analytics accounts to the new interface. Each account will be notified by email once the account has been migrated, where for a minimum of one month, you will have access to both the original interface and the new interface.

1. Thanks largely to the acquired MeasureMap team, Google analytics now has the ability to create customizable dashboards – greatly improving data presentation by establishing top level summaries – you don’t have to hunt and spreadsheet data to find out where your visitors are coming from or other actionable metrics to make those all important business decisions. Half the importance of analytics is being able to deliver the data so that any decision maker can instantly see what is working and what is not working – with a dashboard, you can make sure you are watching the metrics that are important to you without having to do any work manipulating generic reports.

2. Reporting capabilities are now almost as good as any high-level expensive product on the market. First of all, you can now establish remote scheduling and emailing of previous built reports. Second, contextual help and tips are available with every report to help you build up your own capabilities at acting on effective analytics. What’s more, reports now include time trending capabilities as well to recognize market fluctuations in both the short and long term.

3. Reports have also become more robust. Sampled data reports allow you to quickly generate reports for larger segments with high confidence ranges. They are also less cluttered and easier to read. What’s more, Google has added levels to each report so that you can drill down for more information – find metrics/keyword in a CPC report – find visitor navigation paths for each static page – zoom into specific locations within a map overlay in the Geographic Domain report.

4. The best upgrade, in my opinion – plain language descriptions of all the data – allowing any user the ability to quickly interpret what action needs to be done to improve their website.

In my opinion, Google’s upgrade is one of the most worthwhile that Google has done on any of their products in a long time, because for the first time it wasn’t necessarily about innovation so much as it was taking a complicated product (one that is an absolute necessity for anybody with a web property) and making it completely accessible by all people in an organization. But more so, they made it sophisticated enough to handle all the data, and yet intelligent enough that the answers seem almost intuitive to any user. In other words, you don’t need an MBA to be able to read your analytics reports and recognize what needs to be done to improve your website, you just need Google Analytics.

Long Tail Thinking

2007-05-13T21:28:00.001-07:00

Everybody over the past year or more with any type of involvement in buying clicks, be it PPC, CPM, or any other type of keyword associated traffic purchase, has been talking about the long tail of user intent. In other words, those 80-90% of words that people search for, but that do not possess the individual volume to be highly competitive.

For example: let’s say you are running a campaign for Detroit’s latest sports car. First and foremost, you try and buy up all the branded queries because it will take time for your website to get some natural traction and you don’t want to be mugged by any squatters or direct competition. Second, you try to buy all those reasonable search terms that you think your target market is using when they are looking for your product; words like, “sports car”, “fast car”, and “hot car”. But odds are that these keywords are very competitive. Why... because you aren’t the only guy trying to market a sports car. And no matter what your budget is, these words are going to cost you. At this point, somebody says, “lets look at the long tail. Let’s focus our buy on all those words that are less competitive, have a lower CPC, and may not have the same high impressions, but combined, could drive us a lot more traffic at a more reasonable cost level.” And you say, “what a great idea!!! Let’s do that… but what are those words?”

Sound familiar?

The tough part with long tail thinking is that it is not always the right thinking. Sometimes there isn’t a wide variety of keywords that people use when making niche purchases. In other words, if somebody is looking to buy an iPod, they are probably going to only use a handful of search queries… “cheap mp3” is not really a long tail term. What’s more, sometimes long tail thinking opens you up to other types of competition that may not be specific product competitors. For example, if you are looking for long tail words to direct traffic to your family magazine on dealing with kids and allergies, the more varied you get in your keyword purchases, the more likely you are going to eventually start competing with big pharmaceutical companies and trying to reach an intent that doesn’t necessarily match what you are offering.

In short, long tail seems like a great idea on paper, but it very rarely exists, and if you are lucky enough to find some untapped words, the return is far less than what statistics and theory would have you think otherwise.

So what should you do?

First and foremost, focus on language. Synonyms are the biggest net return investment when it comes to sponsored advertising. You would be crazy to focus on “car” and forget “auto” or “ride”. Use online tools to find those synonyms that Keyword tools may not suggest because of low search volume. Don’t forget that all keyword tools are based on an algorithm that does not report Google’s numbers – because Google never shares those numbers. So even though WordTracker says it is a dog, Google might show you it is a Star. Here are some useful tools.

Second, focus on popular culture. Culture influences language, why else has “idol” become synonymous with “rock star” when it used to be considered a sin. Pay attention to what is around you. “Ride” wouldn’t have been a good exchange for “car” ten or twenty years ago, because in the 80s nobody used the phrase – there was no Fast and Furious or MTV pimping – now it is very much a vernacular or the buying generation. These tools can help you find some popular search terms that may be an opportunity for your product.

Yahoo! Buzz Index - shows top movers and top searches in a variety of categories
Google Zeitgeist - shows top news searches, image searches, and a variety of queries. Also shows top gaining and declining search queries.
AOL Search: Hot Searches - browsable searches popular by generic category or amongst AOL members right now, in the past hour, or in the past day
Ask Jeeves Interesting Queries - shows hot searches for the week
Lycos Hot 50
WordTracker also offers a hot search terms list
Technorati offers top searches for the last hour
TrendWatching is a popular site related to...watching trends

Third, and this is the most important… listen to your audience; what’s more, ask them directly. If you are in the B2B market, have direct sales staff ask clients about search terms they use. Maybe try a survey – there are a lot of free tools out there – or try making it a part of you newsletter. Either way, if you want to know what words people associate with your product, the best way to find out is to ask them point blank.

The only way long tail words can ever be effective is if they are actually used by your target market, otherwise, you are just throwing money away on impressions and useless clicks – no matter what the book tells you.

Run for the Cure

2007-05-07T14:07:00.000-07:00

Matt Cutts once said that blogging gives everybody a chance to publish and touch a nation; that if the content is good and honest, people will recognize that... having written articles and worked in the marketing industry for quite some time, I know that it is not enough to simply build something - people won't come just because the content is worthy - you also need buzz. You need a hook, something more or less intangible that can cause a viral interaction. More often than not, you can do this with a dirty picture of a hotel hieress (it has been done before), a political uproar (the same picture but with a Senetor - also has been done before, just a different hieress than the one you are probably thinking of), and sometimes a challenge. Usually the challenge has to be niche, offer a really big incentive (think Superbowl tickets), and have some type of celebrity endorsement.

I have none of the above.

Instead, I am going to test the merit of the challenge theory for buzz without targeting a niche market (although I think the volume of my blog readers makes this very much a niche target), without a grand prize, and without celebrity endorsement. Instead, I'm just going to use every medium I have at my disposal to try and build some awareness, and offer up my public humiliation as incentive.

Once again, I am going to try to raise money for a cure for Breast Cancer; however, this year I am going to go out on a much further limb. I thought that if I agreed to a high level of public embarrassment, people may be inclined to donate more money - if not, to at least pass the message on to friends as well.

For the past year I have continued to grow out my hair; forfeiting office protocol to look less like a derelict bum and more like a working professional; in the hopes that I could donate my locks for a wig for Cancer victims. It is finally long enough!

So, if I can raise $1k for the Run for a Cure, I will shave my head (a given) and also run the entire race in complete DRAG!! (Everybody that donates will get a thank-you card with a picture - do with it what you want, just promise not to tell me if you plan on doing anything dirty!!)

In the event that I can raise $5k, I will, in addition to shaving my head, go one step further in my public embarrassment and promise to run the entire race in the slinkiest of pink ladies underwear. (For those asking themselves, I am not of the ilk to get personal enjoyment from such attire - Imagine a 220lbs man in such an outfit... and although I may have once had the legs, those days are gone).

In my life, my mother, grandmother, and other women that have meant more than the world to me have battled and survived this disease - though I think that the emotional scars are as difficult as the physical. Their strength has always been a guiding light to me. However, I also know wome not as fortunate, though equally strong, that did not have the luck to beat breast cancer. If my humiliation can help build a little more awareness, maybe inspire a few other men to abandon machismo for a good cause, and ultimately raise a few bucks... then let the madness begin!!!

If you can, please donate what you can. If you think it is worthwhile, and have friend that may agree with you, pass the email along. Unfortunately, it is going to take the help of a lot of people for me to raise my goal... they say that every picture has a price, well then, I suppose the price for an absurd picture of me is $5k.

I assure you, I am not trying to bilk money to some secret ex-Soviet account - I'm just trying to do something that I think is right, for all the right reasons - maybe you do too.

Working with Google Website Optimizer

2007-04-27T14:17:00.000-07:00

I apologize for not posting in a very long time - for anyone that has noticed - but as said by the great AC/DC, "I'm Back"do do doo do "in Black"; and not wanting to disappoint, I have compiled a short and succinct entry.

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Google’s latest release has been in the beta pipeline for almost six months - Website Optimizer, Google's free multivariate testing application, allows an advertiser to run rather intensive landing page tests without having to recruit a lot of technical resourcing or statisticians to evaluate the data.

In fact, the interface is so easy to work with it takes most of the “test design” work out of you hands. Really, all you have to do is upload some java code to the landing pages and run through the Google wizard – in as little as ten minutes you can run your own multivariate testing (as complicated as you want to make it) without having to pay an SEM firm huge chunks of money to do it for you. Good for you, bad for me.

At SES NY, Google run a lot of insiders through a mock demo, sort of an inside pitch… what was the key take away? “It isn’t as complicated as it sounds, and the best way to get results is to just get in there and start working with it.”

Mind you, I’ve been building testing and research platforms for user interactions with sponsored and organic Search results for quite some time – not tooting any horns – so I kind of know my way around these woods already. But the truth of the matter is, if you follow a few pretty basic steps from the start, you can really start to use this tool to build some very dramatic improvements to conversion rates, page views, and visitor loyalty. So if you are in the B2B marketplace, B2C, an e-retailer, or an online publisher – Website Optimizer can help you reach your unique business goals – from meeting inventory demands to generating more warm leads…

Get it Right from the Start

1. Decide on which landing page to test. You can run tests on multiple landing pages (however, you are limiting to testing only 8 areas per page), but start off slow. Use the first test as a learning stage as well, don’t be highly restrictive, but don’t think that you can test and solve everything right away. The more complex your testing framework, and the more possible variations your run, the longer it will take to get the volume of clicks necessary to reach a statistical significance.

If you are an experienced marketer, you probably have multiple landing pages running; unique pages for product offerings, target niche, or matched user intent (if you don’t, you should!) – pick one, the best one, the one with the most opportunity for improvement for your first test.

How do you know what page that is? Look at your analytics (everyday) and it won’t take long to see which page isn’t performing as well as you think it should. But also make sure that this page gets enough click volume – you don’t want the test to take forever to give you results!

2. Brainstorm all the things you want to test. Don’t restrict your test to just running different Headers or introductory paragraphs. Try moving calls-to-action. Try making conversion paths more intuitive. Try playing with imagery that offers more resonance to your target audience. If the possibilities seem endless it is because they are.

If you don’t know where to start, take a look at your competition – what are they doing? Can you do it better? Is there something you should copy? Is there something you should avoid? I guarantee that if you spend an hour looking at what everybody else is doing, you will have hundreds of possible testing opportunities.

The trick is to try to narrow down the possible testing options. Take a good look at your conversion path and any market profiling you have done. Look to test those factors that you think will have the best results against your unique business goals. In other words, if you are an e-retailer, will testing the cart call-to-action be better than testing where you put the “contact us” link?

3. Identify the conversion page! This page is often not the landing page – if it is, I strongly suggest you rethink your strategy. The conversion page is the page your visitor gets to once they’ve taken the action you want them to take on your test page. Think “check-out” not “add-to-cart”.

4. Put the tagging in place.

"The Google Website Optimizer will generate little bits of code, called “tags,” for the Test Page and the Conversion Page. All you or your technical person needs to do is a little copying and pasting. Google will even check (validate) that you’ve placed the tags correctly before you can begin. On the Test Page, put the “Control Script” code at the top part of the page (called the “head”) and the “Tracker Script” at the bottom of the page (before the tag). You only need to tag the Conversion Page at the bottom with the “Tracker Script.” Please note the tracking script specifies in its code which is the test page and which the goal page is."

Optimizer will also give you what is called “section script” or tags that you put around those elements of the page that you want to test (remember step 2?). For example, if you wanted to test the headline of the landing page, your code would look like this:

Where “Description” would be the title of your test.

5. After coding all the testing variants – it isn’t as complicated as it sounds – have Google validate the codes. They will tell you if you have done it right or if there are any errors; more so, Google will also tell you how long it will take to get statistically significant results.

6. Sit back and wait for the results… actually, no! Take this time to start thinking about your next round of testing, and testing on other landing pages. Sitting on your laurels will only cause you to take two steps back to the one forward that the testing is giving you.

There are some Caveats

In order to use Website Optimizer, well you have to have both an AdWords account and Google Analytics on your website. Both are free to set up, but a lot of marketers do not have Google’s analytics package on their website – don’t worry, having it will not affect any other analytics you may have running, but don’t expect SiteCatalyst or WebTrends to give you the same sponsored tracking if you are running a multivariate test… it will play with your reporting – but the mild inconvenience is worth it for the potential of exponential gains in sponsored originated conversions.

Give me real Search Volume Numbers

2007-02-27T10:49:00.000-08:00

At SES San Jose last year, Yahoo! allowed all those that were not part of the Beta team an opportunity to see the great and new Panama. (That was almost a year ago and yet at the end of this month all Yahoo! advertisers will be transitioned to the new platform – so much for the strong arm of efficiency.)

I remember sitting in the crowded auditorium of the San Jose Center, listening to the Panama team announce the advantages of assists, and A/B testing (though you have to have a Platinum level to be afforded this luxury), while I choked down my free sandwich and Jones Cola – (others were running back to the Convention floor, stuffing swag under there seats and pretending nobody would notice them stealing 12 pens or Findology massager.)

The mass consensus was that Yahoo! had caught the Google bus, and was jumping off the auction system to try and ride the coattails of its Mountainview competitor. Hardly anybody was as aghast as I was that the one proprietor of free search volume metrics was going to transition to a range instead of quantifiable numbers instead. Then it happened, just before Christmas the Yahoo! API stopped providing search volume on bulk lists (you couldn’t even pretend to set-up an account to get the SV for 40 phrases and cut & paste together a real Keyword Analysis anymore) – every keyword tool was in shambles. Every SEO firm was looking for something to fill the gap, me included.

Were did I go? Everywhere!

Now don’t get me wrong. You should be able to draw up a strong Keyword list just from some analytics investigation, a thorough understanding of the target market, and a firm comprehension of your website/product offering – but everybody likes to be able to put numbers to their “gut” feelings.

But for those not willing to pay money for 3^rd-party tools (tools built on a now defunct API), where could they go… surely the Search Engines would provide some numbers for advertisers to baseline on!

Google

Google has a robust tool that allows you to display data by: search volume, cost and position estimates, search volume trends, and possible negative matches. However, Google doesn’t like to provide numbers, only ranges, because as any free market theorist will tell you, “ranges promote higher spending.” Google knows this, and Google makes a lot of money because they know this – Yahoo! just learned.

However, a range is relatively useless if you don’t know what the maximum and minimum values are. Besides, what about seasonality?

Google Trends to the rescue… not really. Again, there are no numbers to baseline anything, you can track some seasonality, but little else.

There are serious limitations; namely, 70 characters or 4 keywords – that’s all you can query at any one time, but you do get a quick analysis of:

Number of searched over the past year
A forecast of number of searches in the coming months
Keyword age distribution
Keyword gender distribution

In addition, no MSN adCenter account is required to use the tool.

In a Nutshell

“You take the good, you take the bad…” and although it might not be a grown up Tutti, these are the facts of life: the search engine’s are trying to make money – hence, no more freebies, like search volume. MSN may be giving it for a little time, but only because they are trying to net more and more advertisers… hoping that market share will come in tow like a hungry toy poodle (too bad it isn’t). And even though the tools are no longer complete, they are a pretty good second for understanding your market, product, and channel – and honestly, almost as good as any 3^rd party solution, but that is another article.

Microsoft Video Hyperlink Innovation

2007-01-18T14:12:00.000-08:00

Yet again Microsoft is too busy trying to come up wit the coolest marketing innovation to worry about trying to build up market share by getting real search volumes. It seems like they are trying to build the best search engine for advertisers to play with; with adLabs and now the Video Hyperlink capabilities. But nobody is using MSN for search - well, only 10% of people. And honestly, the embedded advertising in videos or the new social video sharing is really only cool to advertisers, people might get a kick out of it, but it isn't cool enough to get the masses off of YouTube.

I like all of Microsoft's API tools - they are vastly more innovative than alot of the other engine's tools in development, but for right now, I'm using them as an instrument for tweaking my Google and Yahoo! campaigns. Because no matter what I do, I can't seem to get enough action in MSN. My CTR and conversions are great, but my impressions suck in comparison to the other engines strictly because of available volume.

These tools have the advertsier in me excited, but the consumer in me is pretty dulled by the whole thing. I can't help but feel like a frosted shredded wheat commercial.

You know that Microsoft is obviously worried about being number three in what seems to be a 2 man race, but why then are they focusing all their R&D efforts on the advertisers and not the consumers - it's basic marketing gone backwards - for god's sake, give us poepl willing to buy and we'll advertise anywhere, cool tools or not.

Free Analytics from MSN

2007-01-15T08:40:00.000-08:00

In another attempt to steal market share, MSN is setting itself up to release a beta test of their own free analytics - code named "Gatineau" - the home of MSN's latest acquisition Deep Metrix, an analytics company. (All along the same lines as Google's acquisition of Urchin to later become Google Analytics.)

In the coming months, Microsoft expects to launch an invitation-only beta to test the tool says Ian Thomas, who heads the Gatineau project for Microsoft's Digital Advertising Solutions team. "We hope to release this product during 2007; however, we're extremely keen to avoid a repeat of Google's experience with Google Analytics, so we will be ramping up our user numbers gradually to make sure everyone has a good experience from a performance perspective."

After its release, Google Analytics was so inundated that it stopped accepting new users - making hopefuls wait for months for an accepted invitation. MSN wants to avoid this turmoil, and position itself for the inevitable onslaught of users. This has to be making such giants as WebTrends and Omniture a little worried; as it is almost certain that MSN and Google will divide the entire small business market and at least be a secondary resource for online giants to cross compare analytics suites. (Want more information? Look at Manoj Jasra's take on the analytics game.) I know that that when I look at analytics packages, there is always a rather large discrepancy across the board; and in my experience, Google provides the best data in relationship to Adwords and website activity.

However, MSN will still be under the same pervading thumb - it may be coming out with very cool and effective tools for marketers (adCenter Labs, etc.), but what it doesn't have is the necessary market share for advertising. Sure the CTR might be strong, as well a the conversion rates for e-retailers using adCenter, but the search volume isn't there to make MSN a player in the search game. Tools be dammed, the people have to be there first!

What will Microsoft's answer be? Watch for them to start talking to the falling and C-suite shuffling Yahoo! - might be the biggest M&A market grab since Coors and Molson.

Content Match in Long Consideration Phases

2007-01-12T10:24:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have been testing the value of content matching for a B2B client with a very long consideration phase - in excess of one year - and with a product\solution valued deep within the six figures. What I am finding is that content match is generating far more leads than traditional SERP advertising.

Why?

My theory is that PPC ads are perceived as more relevant and trustworthy when embedded in the content of a relevant website.

It seems to make sense.

The user is already in a research frame of mind as they are looking through forums and other content when they see your ad. From a branding perspective, the peripheral ad is linked to the relevant content, and even though your company may not be officially sponsoring the forum, there is a natural affinity between your brand and the content the user is engaged with. What this translates into is a higher CTR, but more importantly, a significantly higher conversion rate.

The test continues...

But there is a vast difference between a lead and a sale - this is why I am taking my tests another step forward to identify that content conversion and continue to watch it through to a final sale. This means taking the analytics offline and integrating online marketing with sales - seems like a no brainer, but this doesn't happen very often. More than likely it is because of the scope in question, but I think the lessons learned from watching a few sponsored leads will be worth the extra effort - the client thinks so too.

As well, we need to determine what it is in the content ad that anchors a user - what draws the eye away from the website and towards the embedded ad? Is it because the placement of the ad is not as determined as it is in a SERP? Is it the messaging and the factor of relevancy to the website the ad is displayed on? Or is content matching better at capturing those early stages of the buying funnel that SERP ads, or even better than leader boards and banners? These are questions that deserve some further research, and ones that we at Enquiro will be putting on the docket very soon.

New US Stats for Online Activity

2007-01-02T12:54:00.000-08:00

On December 15th, the US Census Bureau released some new statistics about online user activity; namely:

That adults and teens will spend nearly five months (3,518 hours) next year watching television, surfing the Internet, reading daily newspapers and listening to personal music devices.
Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online in 2005, 92 million purchased a product and 91 million made a travel reservation. About 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.
There were 278 million debit cards in U.S. hands in 2004, with 22.2 billion transactions amounting to more than $1 trillion.
Over $300 billion worth of consumer transactions were conducted online in 2005.

Pew and Associates have noted that there has been an over 500% increase in social networking in 2006 above the previous year. This means that over 80 million users are creating content through blogs, forums, or other social networking avenues - what's more, these social network websites are being used for research and purchasing. More so, all of these social avenues have an element of sponsored activity, be it through content ads, blog sponsorship, or leaderboards - what's more, there is an inherent ability to leap frog consumer touch points to shrink the consideration phase.

If you are not paying attention to social channels - you should be... $300 billion worth and growing...

Relationship Management in Search

2006-12-19T11:18:00.001-08:00

A few months ago, Gord Hotchkiss wrote an article about how “Search Marketing is Crossing the Chasm”; parlaying how, as an industry, Search Marketing has evolved into more mainstream markets – crossing that chasm or hitting that tipping point from where it goes from an early adopter innovation into a common corporate budgetary line item.

He is entirely right.

I don’t argue that Search Marketing has reached the mainstream, or that its pace of adoption has increased momentum – these are industry accepted mores that make it such an interesting time to be involved in the work. I mean Google has emerged as the X-generations Warren Buffet (not the Margaritaville guy), almost completely replacing the toddler NASDAQ index as a baseline for the marketing/tech sectors economic well-being. Fortune-500 companies are looking for outside expertise as the value in Search is becoming more and more apparent.
What seems particularly interesting to me, is not necessarily the timeline or growth of Search, but the “whys” and the “what’s in store.” I think that as Search becomes more and more readily adopted, the role of user/customer relationships and Search will become more and more prevalent.

Whys

Fortune-500 companies were not the innovators that developed the Internet. Garage based mentality created the Web – people without the financial backbone to be restricted by unproven mediums and having to mitigate risk for stockholders; people that were not afraid to be bold and build a Website to market traditional products in new ways.

Some people made money, some people lost their shirts – some did both.

But it took the bigger of the brick-and-mortar operations a little longer to develop a Web presence, and when they did, it was a rush job, a band-aid solution built on a “good enough” strategy pushed by an unprecedented priority.

Why?...

CEOs were losing their jobs because upstarts that were not even on the competitive horizon a few years earlier were biting off bigger and bigger pieces of all but owned profit margins. This happened because the same guys creating Websites hung out with the guys creating Search Engines, (or at the very least they had a mutually beneficial relationship like barnacles and a blue whale - oh how the roles have changed over the last five years as the barnacle became the whale and vice versa). And people/consumers adopted Search because computers became affordable (it’s no stretch that the two have a correlation) and Search was easier than actually going out and window shopping or having to create requests for tender and reference check the “heck out of ‘em.”

Basically, Search is being adopted because it works.

Google alone gets 61.84% of the total global Search volume (Hitwise data – December 15th-2006) – translate that into a hard number and the financial pie looks pretty appetizing to every and any company in the world. Plus, the Fortune-500 haven’t been able to get their assumed “just share” of the Search pie because realistically, it isn’t enough just to have a Website you really need to optimize that Website; and band-aid mentality doesn’t allow you to do that.

So what is happening now, Fortune-500s are scrambling to redesign their Websites because it has a proven ROI – only, now they want to do it right, because Search has a proven ROI. This creates two problems:

1.) maintaining your SERP presence and visibility through the transition,
and 2.) building that SERP presence and visibility out through the transition.

At its root, it’s been consistently viewed as an issue of traffic – maintaining and building traffic at the expense of competitors and not yourself – but using this as your impetus is tragically flawed.
A lot of firms are very good at this, and for a lot of firms this is all that they do. After all, it is accepted that this is what Search is, and this is how Search will “cross the chasm.” But Search should be so much more…

What’s in Store?

Financial Analysts always say that there are two ways to make more money: get a raise or spend less. Spending less will always make you more money, forever and ever – it is sustainable; however, when you ask for a raise, you inevitable celebrate your cubicle victory with a fancy dinner and a gift. You never notice the new tax bracket until too late.

What am I getting at?

Search needs to focus on retaining traffic and its role in relationship management to give companies real value. You see, it’s not about getting more traffic; it’s about doing more with your traffic. The Search Engines are already laying the groundwork for this. This is why Landing Page quality is becoming so much more important in determining cost/clicks.

If you think of the entire customer relationship as a straight line – the Search engines know they have a toe hold on the point of online purchase phase. They even have a pretty good toe hold on first contact and other touch points through organic listings, but they don’t own the consideration with offline purchase section or the maintaining customer relations section.

Having a successful customer relationship means really connecting with a user throughout brand building and awareness phases (PPC can be effective here, even though that is not a common practice, through ad messaging targeted to a research intent), coaching the consideration and sale, but also maintaining and sustaining that relationship post-sale. Search can have an active role throughout this entire process – through social media, multimedia, sponsorship of blogs, forums, and newsletters – Search does not have to operate in half integrated silos, nor should it.

As companies begin to “cross the chasm” and transition their Websites, this relation management perspective needs to be the overarching goal for all activity. But in addition, this needs to be the only absolute success metric. If you want Search to work for you, you absolutely need to start from the perspective that you are building, nurturing, and rewarding a relationship with your customers – otherwise, all you are really doing is mathematics and meta tags.

If you want to know more about how relationship management works with Search, and innovative techniques to making all the elements of Search work for your website – I strongly suggest the following Blogs:

• Usetube
• Web Analytics World
• SEOSpace
• SearchTank

Each blog is customer centric in its focus – and understands how relationship management will be what defines Search in the near future.

Best Side Sponsored Position

2006-12-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

Oftentimes marketers prefer to position ads in the top-three; after all, it is the best spot to be given first fixations and scan patterns - however, sometimes costing and budget restraints make it next to impossible to maintain that top-sponsored position.

Why? Because not every company has the same ROI for a given keyword, branding is worth more to some companies than others; and there are still those that have yet to make an investment in SEM to turn high CTR into high conversion rates.

But if you can't be in the top sponsored, is there a better position to be in? In other words, where is the best spot for side-sponsored ads?

Our recent research has indicated two possible outcomes as being highly favorable opportunities for those relegated to advertising in the side-sponsored position.

Being in the fourth or fifth side sponsored position (just above the fold) has a higher fixation count than any other side-sponsored, except for the first position (which is usually as cost-prohibitive as the top-sponsored). But interestingly, this position also gets a higher share of the sponsored clicks than those 2 or 3 ads before it. However, this only holds true if the top side-sponsored ad is gauged as relevant to the searchers query. So if the top side-sponsored ad is bad, you are in a non-performing wasteland and should consider bidding on a different keyword.
Google only shows top-sponsored ads if there is not a more highly regarded and relevant organic listing. If there is, Google will only display side-sponsored ads in the SERP. In this case, if there is a good cost opportunity for the 4th or 5th spot - take it. But in this case, the same rule holds true as in the first scenario - if the top ad stinks it doesn't matter how good your messaging, call-to-action, or hit bolding is, users will never look at your ads.

What does this mean for you?

I strongly suggest that if you have a manageable basket of keywords in your sponsored campaign, perform SERP analyses for each query before cementing a bidding strategy. Take a look at theses top ads and the bid price per position before you decide the value to your company in competing on any one query.

For more information, take a look at our latest Research paper: Enquiro Eye Tracking Report II: Google, MSN and Yahoo! Compared

Yahoo! Putting the Last Knife in the Auction System

2006-11-30T08:38:00.000-08:00

To most Americans, Adam Smith is the pioneer of the economic standard (even though he was a Scot). He was ahead of his time in recommending, on a backdrop of colonial independence that there should be less government intervention in the modern economy; and that a free market system would not only sustain itself, but also provide the best economic return. In other words, a consistence transparency and competitive environment would keep costs in check. A competitive environment stops any one person from demanding too high of a price, and knowing what your competition is willing to charge/pay keeps you competitive. Everything is in balance an equilibrium.

However, for Search Engines, who make there money based largely on Cost per Click - having a high level of transparency isn't profitable. Google makes unbelievable returns because knowing the competitive landscape for sponsored campaigns is difficult at best. Marketers can only really speculate on bid prices (besides that isn't the only factor in Google's algorithm that determines CPC) for certain positions. The result is highly relevant results (I would like to believe this) - as Marketers focus on messaging and landing page content to vie for the best SERP position. However, the one obvious result of all this activity is that the CPC for any one keyword is not as controllable in Google as it is in Yahoo! - you cannot buy a position, you cannot instantly see that a keyword is too costly for you to enter the competitive fray, and you cannot instantly see the competitive opportunities / advantageous points of entry. (But I suppose that is why people hire firms like ours.)

The Yahoo! Panama update has been talked about incessantly. We all knew it was coming down the pipe, and although some of the features I am actually quite excited about (like the innovation of tracking keyword/click assists) - I am least excited about the movement form concrete numbers to a Google type estimate. And yet, this is the first across the board change; meaning that even if you haven't upgraded to the new interface, as of next month you will no longer get the "Top-5 Max Bids","Position" or "Your Cost" columns in the Yahoo! sponsored interface. Instead, you will get ranges and estimates.

What are the Real Implications?

For a lot of sponsored strategists running campaigns in Yahoo!, the best bidding strategy was something called "bidding the gap/Gap Surfing." This was when you could see that there was a gap between first and second position's bids (for example) that made owning the position possible. For example, let's say the top bid was $1.00 and the second bid was $0.10; by bidding $0.99 you could buy the second position for a CPC of $0.11 (because of Yahoo!'s "penny more" rule). With this change, the transparency needed to bid the gap no longer exists. You cannot buy a position any more for the least amount of money. If all you have are estimates, you have to incrementally increase your bid price for best position. What is the result? Overall, the CPC for everybody will go up, as those competitors with the deepest pockets throw more money into the pot for the same market share.

The only person that really benefits here is Yahoo!, as profits will grow.

Whether or not you think this will get more relevant sponsored results in the Yahoo! SERP is a question of whether or not you think the market itself is the best regulator. Most businessmen think that the market does a pretty fine job of regulating itself, but then there always seems to be an ENRON in the midst. However, on the flip side, how often does eBay or Amazon take the number one spot in Google's SERP? That isn't highly relevant either.

The New Concern

Google's keyword tool currently provides ranges, not numbers when helping marketers determine the best keyword to optimize content for or build a sponsored campaign around. The only caveat is that Google doesn't provide a baseline for those range graphs. According to the graphs, "Business" has a slightly higher search volume than "EDI" - unlikely!

As well, we have no idea what number the graph is representational of... is a full graph equal to 1 million searches or 5? Yahoo!, on the other hand provides real numbers - a quantifiable metric to calculate opportunities. In addition, Yahoo! provides real bid costs so you can correlate volume and cost to make the right strategic decision. Now that they are moving to estimates and the "view bids" option will no longer be available - how right will our decisions be tomorrow?

Life Events Spark Purchase Behaviors

2006-11-28T10:11:00.000-08:00

It is an oft understood maxim amongst marketers that the key to effective marketing is having your brand linked to a life event; because for whatever reason, as consumers, we tend to get itchy in our wallets when our lives suddenly change. For whatever reason, over the course of history, we have associated purchases with celebrations, gifts mark the change in relationships, education, personal growth, or even age. For instance, Dell has been very effective at targeting that 18 year old college applicant niche, becoming the brand that is widely associated with given your children a leg up in their post-secondary pursuits. But the ads aren't targeted to the kids, because what college student has money for anything other than beer; the ads are targeted to the parents, whose discretionary income is just beginning to be tapped by their begging child in residence.

According to BIGresearch, certain media channels are more effective at reaching a particular audience across all major product areas. namely, Internet Advertising is particularly influential in major purchases (home, electronics, insurance, & automobiles) during such life stages as getting married, starting college, getting divorced, expecting a child, and retiring.

It is the longer consideration phase purchases that seem to be more highly influenced by Internet Advertising - why? - research. Believe it or not, consumers are actually shifting away from direct competitive shopping to going through the entire decision making process online and either purchasing off of a website, or going to the local store to buy. Marketing today isn't about getting people in the door, marketing today, whether B2C or B2B, is about qualifying leads - pushing/coaching an audience right to the cash register.

So what the implications of this research on the B2B market?

It begs the questions... how much do you know your audience? Are their certain events that spark consideration in your particular product/service offering? Are you messaging in order to resonate with those events? Are you leveraging that behavior pattern to push/coach your audience to the cash register - so to speak?

With one such client, we tested this very scenario of associating keywords with consideration stages and events, changing the ad and landing page messaging to reflect these associations, and keeping the ad visibility and positioning the same. The results were an increase in CTR of nearly 30% and a 47% increase in conversions. However, each page had a unique CTA, and the conversions were lead generations, not completed sales - the consideration phase for the client is about six months so we still have yet to see the actual impact on sales, but the increases are promising.

The Takeaways

Prioritize the various events that spark consideration in your product/service
Associate and build out your keywords to resonate with these events/behaviors
Target your messaging to these events/behaviors
Create unique calls to action on unique landing pages
Don't try to create one page that has messaging for multiple audience behaviors/considerations - instead, create targeted messaging for each niche that resonates with the audience - it may be a little more work upfront, but eventually those pages will also rank organically for the same keyword-consideration associations, and the leads will roll in.

Impact of Search on Offline Purchases

2006-11-27T07:47:00.000-08:00

Having recovered from the Thanksgiving weekend, I am throwing myself back into work... slowly at first, but I should pick up steam in time for my Christmas vacation - winter efficiency is what management calls it (it is its own line item on the year-end financials).

However, as I read throw the litany of emails in my inbox, I noticed a press release for ROI Research's latest study: Quantifying the Offline Impact of Search.

Too often we lament the difficulty in being able to actually draw a correlative link between offline purchases and online search. Instinctively, we know that there exists a connection between Brand and search, and that that relationship must carry over into the offline environment. As well, we know there must be activity that carries forward in those long consideration phases, where repeat searches are a flurry and prospects double up on both online and offline activity. However, there really hasn't been much conclusive evidence to reinforce what we know must be true - why? Honestly, because the Internet allows for a certain threshold of anonymity, one that no good marketer willingly wants to cross, but that makes causal relationships difficult to prove. This is why any research that somehow gets us a little closer to confirming our instincts is very exciting - at least to me (and hopefully to you as well, otherwise, why are you still reading?)

Even though the data is based on the results of a web survey, which at the best of times is a flawed process due to sample bias - you only get responses from those with a vested interest in the results or from either end of the sample spectrum... so angry or so happy that they have to fill out the survey. You never get a real or completely accurate representation of a population when you "ask" people their opinions or actions. Still, this is an inherent flaw in all survey testing, and should in no way undervalue ROI Research's findings as unique and leading edge - why? Because at least they had the foresight to have "historical purchase data appended from the client's customer transactions database."

The Findings

1. In this category, for every $1 dollar spent online, the average search-user spends $2.56 offline. This shows that Search has the ability to influence an incremental 3 times the dollar value of e-commerce transactions by reaching consumers who shop in traditional channels. Interestingly, the factor was even higher for existing client customers with a ratio of 3.37x spent offline vs. online.

2. Frequent searching correlates with higher spending. Those who search up to 10 times annually spend an average of $1,789 online while those who searched 31+ times spent an average of $2,943 online. Similarly in off-line transactions, those who search 10 or fewer times spend an average of $2,219 through retail locations, while those who search 31+ times spend an average of $3,839.

3. Search influences 20-30% of purchases made at retail locations.

4. By indexing the influence on purchase of Search we are able to quantify the amount of money spent as a result of Search. For the client's Online Purchasers, 48% of money spent online and 34% of money spent at retail locations can be attributed to Search. Among general consumers, Search accounts for 49% of online purchases and 42% of retail purchases.

Applications

According to Brand Marketers, paid search is the most effective marketing tactic, and ROI Research's findings show that there is a definite lift in offline purchase behavior from search. But it is important that search resonate and be driven by your target market. Later today (maybe tomorrow), I want to write on the effect of environmental shifts on purchase behavior as it pertains to paid search - there are some interesting new findings here as well. But in the meantime, know that there is a positive correlation between paid search and offline purchasing.

Usability and Page Momentum

2006-11-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Engagement vs. Recall - Small Eye-Tracking Usability Study, a blog post by Cory Bates about a test he ran comparing a text page to a graphics page. If you have the time, I strongly recommend giving it a read, if only, to reinforce the idea that best practices really only apply to "best practice audiences." In other words, as Cory has said, each page on a website has a unique momentum that should always be considered when designing or redesigning a website.

I've written a few posts about conversion paths and ideal conversion scenarios, always emphasizing that it is key to understand your target first - you don't build a house without first looking at the community, your needs, and the local contractors. What was especially interesting in Cory's post was the confidence level from subjects in the graphical test group - it seems that people respond stronger to images than just words.

Resonating with your target audience should be the primary focus of any online activity; this is the horse that will always pull the revenue cart. Whether that resonance is achieved purely through written content or graphics is a decision that needs to be made with a firm understanding of your unique target audience as well as an understanding of your own websites momentum.

Widgets for B2B

2006-11-15T11:48:00.000-08:00

What is a Widget?

Widgets are applications that can be downloaded onto users' desktops, or inserted into their personal web pages, blogs or social-network profiles.

Users can pull content from a variety of sources - eliminating their need to visit multiple websites to gather information.

Widgets can serve as highly targeted branding and direct marketing tools, even though most programs range from games and jokes to utilities such as search tools, calculators and maps. Moreover, these personalized tools are helping marketers reach an ever growing community of users who want updated information on goods and services they are interested in. But B2B is slow to take up the opportunities, of building brand awareness through indirect "sponsorship" of useful tools that their target market would be interested in having.

Traditional B2B marketing has always involved branded gifts - pens, calculators, calendars; anything to get the business name in the office and periphery of influencers or purchasers. However, online B2B marketers have not readily adopted the inherent opportunities in widgets.

Look to the Consumer Market

Companies are using adverwidgets to enhance users' daily lives. For example, the Acura RDX Traffic Widget on Yahoo! Widgets shows traffic incidents and road construction that can be customized to a users' area. I have my Google homepage set-up with a widget to give me a video feed of last night's Daily Show - not necessarily enhancing my life, but making the daily grind a little more bearable.

Amazon.com offers widgets that turn users' websites into mini-shopping portals, providing shoppers with a more convenient way to comparison shop without having to visit multiple sites.

B2B Opportunities

Why can't widgets be used as a mutant way to linkbait, leveraging shared markets with clients to build brand awareness? Imagine an EDI news ticker on the bottom of your client's website, or something more creative: "EDI Warrior," a game built around the premise of one masked marauder working to create a fail safe world where everybody could communicate, regardless of language and position in the supply chain. (I don't think the game actually exists, but such creativity drove Livevault to hire John Cleese and build leads by 300%.)

Start looking at the brand association and building opportunities of widgets - they may not be a good fit for every company, but a little lateral thinking could make them right for your company and build you a very strong competitive advantage.

Online Advertising Surpasses $4 Billion

2006-11-15T11:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the IAB and PricewaterhouseCooper announced the estimated online advertising revenues for Q3 2006. Overall, the $4.2 billion figure is a 33% gain over last year.

"The consistent growth of online advertising is a clear indication that marketers continue to embrace the true power of Interactive Advertising," said Sheryl Draizen, SVP, General Manager, IAB. "Marketers are experiencing how this medium enhances their ability to target and engage the audience that matters to their brand and then measure its effectiveness in ways no other medium provides."

Q3 marks the single largest revenue producing quarter ever, and puts online advertising revenue on par for its biggest year. Consummer and Business' medium preference is shifting towards the online environment, as traditional collateral and sales processes are becoming less and less effective.

Overall, this growth is following the trend of where consumers are spending their media time, in addition to the unique ability of online advertising to effectively target and monitor ad campaigns, while having direct links to ROI.

Thank-You

2006-11-12T17:29:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I stood before a cenotaph to give thanks in memory to those past, and those present. In such times as these, no matter what your political stance, I do not think that you can ever be unappreciative or ungrateful for all those that have gone into both dark and dangerous places to protect all those in need.

To all of those impacted by war, who have served... thank-you, and be safe.

Adwords Customer Service

2006-11-12T17:09:00.001-08:00

Ordinarily Google is exceptionally good at supporting Adwords advertisers - other than the mild irritation with their prescribed bulk template and the unique keyword row, I have never had a problem with their service. However, the new quality score and budgeting upgrades are leaving a little to be desired.

First, one client of ours was charged 5 times their daily budget on a Friday and due to the spend, the ads were shut down for the remainder of the weekend. Why? Because technical support doesn't work the weekends.

And again, this Saturday a similar event occurred, this time with a different client. As a result, I had to create temporary campaigns (duplicates) to run this weekend until I can get tech support to reconcile their errors. Perhaps I will get them on the phone before they even read my twenty or so emails - I know that some people there will be inundated because they gave me personal emails for contacting them.

Nobody expects perfection in business - it doesn't happen, no matter how hard we strive, but we do expect support while trying to make it a reality.

Business doesn't sleep on the weekend... influencers take their purchasing decisions home, hiding in their office - playing catch-up from the week that didn't quite go as planned - because in a nutshell, that is business in the modern age.

Google is slowly beginning to lapse into a sheltered gluttony from being on top too long. I know they give us warning of upgrades and being locked out of the interface. I also know that errors arise, and even the mighty Google is not infallible. But the fact of the matter is that we are always trying to connect with our customers, always trying to match intent with content, and this means always being accessible. It also means that no matter how much any one business is spending on Adwords, Google has a duty to ensure that the best service is available at all times.

If my target market is working on a Sunday, then I have to work on a Sunday... and in order to be effective, I need all my resources available on a Sunday too.

Enquiro Eye Tracking White Paper

2006-11-07T14:03:00.000-08:00

Enquiro released a new whitepaper today comparing user interactions in MSN, Yahoo! and Google.

Our original study used eye tracking technology to quantify what user interactions with the Google search results page looked like. The results were the "Golden Triangle" image which has been discussed extensively. Of course, because the scope of the original study was restricted to Google, that left one big question: What about the other engines? This new study from Enquiro not only answers that question but attempts to explain some of the differences in search behaviors noticed on Yahoo! and MSN search results pages.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is the effect of percieved relevance on search behavior, particularly in the interaction with sponsored listings. However, the whitepaper also covers:

How We Scan a Listing
Semantic Mapping
Information Scent
Thin Slicing
Banner Blindness
Growth of Navigational Search
Impact of Bolded Search Queries and Icons
Perceived Relevancy
Golden Section Theory
Portal Entry Success
Interactions with Top Sponsored
Interactions with Side Sponsored
Interactions with Top Organic
Interactions with Bottom Organic
Interactions with Vertical Results

Google's View of a Copyright and Robots

2006-11-07T11:15:00.000-08:00

Google has taken a firm stance today against the proposed changes to the Australia's copyright laws that could allow for legal action against search engines for caching and indexing.

"Given the vast size of the Internet, it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached," Google said today.

However, this debate is not new - currently, Google is already in a legal dispute with Agence France-Presse, who have complained that the Internet giant had used their material without permission or compensation - and how many legal actions are being filed in back rooms after the YouTube merger (according to Andy Beal, the threat is not immenint, it is certain)?

Google is forever at the beating end of the copyright stick - more so it seems than any other search engine, but you can chalk that up entirely to the fact that when Google is mentioned ears start to prick up - that and the fact that Google shares are four times the trading value of their nearest competitor. But I do not want to paint them out as being the poor "stepchild" and play out the Google maxim of "don't shoot the messenger." However, who is inevitably responsible for this failure to recognize original content?

It seems to me like everybody wants to be in the search engines, my entire industry is built around trying to satisfy that need, then how can the search engine be culpable for making copywritten material accessible. They aren't using it, they aren't accessing (really); they are just making it easier for people to see it and access it.

Isn't it the responsibility of the provider to make sure they have the proper measures in place to make sure these type of "invasions" do not happen; whether that be a robots.txt file or some other measure. Rather than look at like Google is the thief and the publisher just happened to accidentally leave his/her keys in the ignition; think of it like Google as the road. Sure the thief/user couldn't have stolen the car without a road to drive on, or the keys - but surely the road is no more to blame than the dimwitted owner.

I think Google has actually taken a good step in being proactive and opening up some used-to-be difficult to manage communication channels with its Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its revisions to Webmaster Central - teaching publishers how to protect content effectively. Maybe they could be more proactive and help to guide legislation that could possibly work and make it easier for publishers to attack infringing users without crossing that anonymity threshold that I so strongly defend when I am surfing the Internet.

Without a doubt, Australia's new legislation has not been designed to work at first pass, but don't think for a second that this doesn't mean that legislation is needed in the near future, and that legislation is coming. Almost every countries copyright acts are outdated and do not consider the transmission of information via the Internet - this will change; however, in the interim, learn how to protect your content from the threat of copyright infringement. It is far better to spend money proactively and today, then to fight a long and oft unsuccessful lawsuit for years to come.

Changes to AdSense Network Coming

2006-11-07T07:32:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, the Inside AdWords blog announced that Google will be "improv[ing] the quality of [its] users' experience when they visit an advertiser's landing page" by enforcing the same Quality Score for Adwords into contextually-targeted ads.

Andrew C., product marketing manager for Ads Quality initiatives says, " First, we'll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change. Second, we're improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system."

The goal is to create a stronger user experience, not only with the ads themselves, but once the user clicks through to the website as well, because, obviously, if users have a rewarding experience then they are more likely to click on contextual ads in later instances as well.

However, it is important to acknowledge that "while one's landing page quality is directly correlated with the minimum bid required for one's ads to run, it does not affect your ads position (or 'rank', as it is often referred to) at all. However, since there is no minimum bid requirement for contextually-targeted ads, low quality landing pages will result in the need to bid higher to compete in the auction, which could also impact your position on pages in the network."

In the B2B market, it is now more important than ever to ensure that landing pages our built for the specific needs of your target market, that the content is specific and engaging, and that the conversion path is clearly laid out to create the best user experience. There is no cookie cutter way to create the perfect landing page, not for the search engines or for users; however, if you have to pick one audience to optimize your pages for - I'd go for the user and not the engine.

Never One to Follow the Standard Path

2006-11-06T09:27:00.000-08:00

Google is expected to announce today that it will be running a test for some of its major advertisers to supply ads for up to 50 American Newspapers (NY Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune to name a few) - expect this to move forward for all advertisers in the very near future.

Far be it for Google to follow the traditional pathway... instead, opting to take their very successful ad strategies offline to try and resurrect the dying newspaper industry. The same industry that is avidly trying to scale back content for every revenue generating/advertising opportunity possible.

The program, which Google is expected to formally announce today, will mark Google's first real foray into the sale and placement of advertising into traditional print mediums - they have already successfully implemented radio ads.

The system will work similarly to Google's Ad Sense that sells advertising space on thousands of Web sites via an online auction system. Small businesses then pay for these ads normally in the tens of dollars rather than the tens of thousands, which begs the question of content. Is Google just taking over the classifieds?

Not really, imagine relevant "Google ads" dynamically generated and placed within article frames. For instance, a small text ad for "Forensic Accountants" in an article about Enron sentences being handed out. It is already happening in the online side of many newspapers, it only seems like an obvious progression to put it into the actual print medium.

Tracking conversions may prove to be a real problem; instead, this should be looked at as a branding exercise with some real demographic targeting capabilities. In other words, a way for smaller businesses to target tech influencers for example, in select urban locations without having to spend those massive capital costs associated with ad space on B4 of the Tribune (carrying costs of thousands/day).

As well, there will be no CPC - it has to be CPM (traditional model), but it may just be the lifeline the newspaper industry needs to continue on in the new millennium. Besides, the Times already implemented photos instead of those line pictures; they even brought in some color to select bylines....

It only makes sense that if newspapers want to recapture the audience that they have lost to online content generators that they should resolve themselves to look and feel like those particular competitors.

News readers have changed their behaviour with the onset of the Internet, they scan, the fixate on anchor points, and they are blind to non-relevant ads - perhaps we can see the new Citizen Cane saying "Googlebud" instead in the remake..... But honestly, the impact is not that consequential, so long as Doonesbury is still on D12, I'm happy.

Targeting Qualified Leads

2006-11-02T13:44:00.000-08:00

I was reading Brian Carroll's blog posts today, he always provides some very useful insight into B2B lead generation.

Today his post was a commentary on Mac McIntosh's (covering his bases as both a Scotsman and Irishman) October 30th article for Multichannel Merchant, "Targeting Your B2B Lead Generation" - if you haven't read the article, do, and quickly implement its recommendations as fast as you can. McIntoshes article isn't revolutionary, but it does hammer home how customer centrism needs to be an integral part of any businesses core philosophy, and how understanding your current customer can help you to define the opportunities for and needs of future customers. - It may not be rocket science, but oddly enough, it isn't universally applied.

Why not?

Maybe B2B marketers spend too much time forecasting and thinking days out to bring business decisions back to what they already know to be true. In other words, your best resource for information about growing your customer base and increasing sales is your current customer base. Find out what makes them unique and what makes your product/service especially unique at satisfying their needs - then leverage that information. You will probably find that customers have more in common with each other at their root, and that it is more a concern of growing your market share and perception. After all, every one of your prospects should have something in common that can always define them as a particular market segment - the need for your service/product.

McIntosh's Insight

In McIntosh's article he talks about using geography to target leads. Marketers have always done this, sending out mailers to specific zip codes, pricing based on shipping routes, etc, but very few bother to apply this rule to online marketing. Too often we confuse trying to build awareness and increase market reach with supplying sales with real and qualified leads - that's why most B2B marketers never explore the value of geo-targeted sponsored campaigns.

Geo-Targeted Campaigns

Every search engine, well most of them anyways, has the ability to geo-target through its sponsored search interface, but very few marketers make use of it. Consider the impact of being able to target messaging and content by regional qualifiers, without having to limit your search volume potential by bidding on a query string with a city or state in the keyphrase. In other words, why bid on "Chicago EDI Consultant"? How often does a prospect actually search with a regional qualifier - not often. You can capture more prospects by bidding on "EDI Consultant" and establishing your regional parameters to the metropolitan Chicago area. In fact, if you do a little homework up front, you can use you current sponsored campaign to target within a few blocks radius.

(Ever notice how similar companies tend to be located in the same industrial park, or how similar manufacturers are all within the same region. Vicinity to steel and rubber manufacturing made Detroit the automotive city - so why not do some homework and target your sponsored campaign to select regions to maximize the return and qualify your leads.)

What if you are trying to land one particular prospect? What if you dream of landing that big whale? You can utilize geo-targeting and have your ads appear only for the area of that prospect's corporate office - for a wider and broader variety of keywords - if you only pay for clicks, isn't it better to segment your market prior to that click?

Sponsored search advertising should always be about getting the message to the right people in as much as it is about getting the right message out there.

Text vs Graphical Links

2006-10-31T09:05:00.000-08:00

Do people respond to visual elements or textual elements?

For a long time this question has been at the root of a considerable amount of Internet Research, particularly in SEM and SEO. Sometimes we get confused by the fact that in our work environment there are two separate users; namely, the computer and the person using the computer. We tend to ignore the computer, calling it an intermediary, and yet we tend to focus, by majority, on how the computer interacts with a website and not necessarily how the person interacts with the website. It isn't so much ironic as it is a red herring.

The fact of the matter is that computers see numbers and text - nothing else. Pictures are really just a series of numbers with tags to a computer or spider - in other words, graphics are a complex representation of a mathematical formula. (I wonder if Van Gogh or Monet would be impressed with this modern day view.) But to people, pictures create an emotional connection; pictures give way to resonance with a memory; pictures speak a thousand words...

E-commerce knows the value of a picture and a graphical link - when was the last time you were on Amazon and there wasn't a at the very least a picture of the book that you were trying to order. It is a way of putting a tangible inference on bits and bytes. In fact, a University of Maryland study in 2000 showed that there was a 700% increase in page views and subsequent conversions when a graphical link was used over text; or a 200% increase if both were used in an e-commerce environment. While a new study by Silverpop Systems Inc found that the average click rate for B2C e-mails with lifestyle photography was 6.3% and 5.4% without it.

Sure this is in an environment of e-commerce and direct marketing - but can the results be universally applied?

Our own research into SERP (search engine results page) interaction has shown that the visual element of text is what attracts fixations, whether that be hit bolding or resonance with a user's semantic map - the ultimate truth was that a word can act as an anchor point for a user interaction. However, the scan time is a matter of 100ths of seconds - too short to actually read and make a cognitive association, but slow enough to make a cognitive interaction with a visual element. It seems weird, but the user actually sees a picture of the word in that time frame (sort of the way all of those late night infomercials tell you that you can become a speed reader) and doesn't honestly read it. It's a stretch, but it does reinforce the power of visual elements.

If this is the case, why are most B2B websites designed to look like traditional print collateral, laden with text after text, too long, too many words, and very few images?

Understandably it is difficult to capture the promise of a fully integrated EDI solution in 8x10 glossy, but there are ways to make an emotional connection with a user through imagery in a B2B environment. In fact, when Habeas redesigned its homepage to include the image of a satisfied marketing director, page views increased 240%. Why? Because users resonated - they wanted to be satisfied marketers.

Google (pressured by AOL?) and Yahoo! have both been experimenting with graphic ads, whether it be putting them into their respective sponsored search platforms or designing new engines (like Google Base) to meet that opportunity. The fact of the matter is that SEARCH has become the front page for B2B websites, and if marketers and SEM firms alike do not start thinking about the end user and making emotional connections within a prospect/product relationship, B2B will lose. Innovation is the key to online success - taking advantage of those opportunities in the pipeline - the ones that your industry hasn't leveraged yet. For sponsored B2B, the next big thing will be an age old e-commerce practice, connecting brand/product with a graphical representation, because people make purchasing decisions; people are influencers; and people look at your ads, listings, and websites.

The Real Cost of a Sponsored Campaign

2006-10-27T13:41:00.000-07:00

In the past week I have had two prospective clients raise questions that ultimately stem to the "real value" of having a sponsored campaign, but more importantly, how you derive that "real value."

First of all, lets get some semantics out of the way.... Clicks are valuable; visits are valuable; reducing the CPC is valuable; brand awareness is valuable; but nothing is as valuable as a return on the bottom line. This doesn't mean just improving conversions, but improving the cost/conversion and the lifelong value of every single sale or lead. This is "real value," and sometimes being able to recognize and/or reconcile that true metric is not that easy, especially if you have a longer sales cycle and the purchase decision involves a longer than normal research phase.

So what are the issues?

If a click is somewhere in the distance past, how can you reconcile that unique visit with all the subsequent visits (whether organic, direct, or sponsored) within the research to purchase stage? What about linking this activity to a unique lead or any conversion? What about actually being able to cost all that activity to get a "real" metric.

These are difficult questions within the B2B marketplace... why?

Well for one thing, we are dealing with a fairly tech savvy market segment that doesn't accept cookies or traditional tracking methods - in fact, if anything, that market can be characterized with a certain paranoia around Internet activity and anonymity thresholds. This means it is very difficult to track click paths and activity linked to a unique visitor. Look at your analytics - do you honestly believe that your website is getting that many unique visitors? If it is, then your lead ratio is a bigger problem than you thought.

What else?

The B2B client isn't one person. In fact, there are multiple stakeholders involved in the process of research and purchase, each one visiting your website at some point; each one looking for different content and reinforcers; each one entering and exiting your site at different times, via different avenues. In the traditional method - the one that most sales departments are still built around - sales is an N2N interaction. One salesman, one client, one bottle of whatever it takes and a steak dinner (the original set for the Miller play). Traditionally, stakeholders were limited and any departmental interaction was behind the scenes, only bridged with the one presentation and office walk through. But today, there are a lot of influencers in the mix; namely, a tech influencer convincing his manager that a solution is needed, a manager looking to increase efficiencies, a CFO or CIO wanting to innovate, and a purchasing agent somewhere in there trying to dot the "i"s and cross the "t"s. Each one looking online for a solution, hopefully yours. But in reality, collectively they are one qualified lead - your analytics will tell you a different story.

Other Problems?

Throw into the mix the fact that you are not running just a simple sponsored campaign. You got smart along the way and started doing some organic optimization, usability testing, and customer research... didn't you? You are also probably trying to build a brand and have banner ads running (new research suggests that text ads are more effective if run in conjunction with banner ads - Harris Direct saw a 249% improvement in contextual ad clicks partnered with a banner buy) - maybe you are sponsoring a blog, or running unique PPC campaigns to whitepapers and internal research, or you have seen some value in site targeted content matching - either way, the funnel of your sponsored activity is wide.

Summarize

So lets summarize... you have multiple stakeholders, a long sales cycle, multiple visits, multiple sponsored campaigns, multiple entry points, multiple exit points, probably multiple products or solutions that compliment each other, multiple conversions and conversion paths, and one "real" lead. Oh yeah... and you need to quantify and cost that lead to see if your sponsored activity has "real value" - plus you have to assess a certain share of the driving force to one campaign over the other. Now for the kicker, you have analytics giving you all kinds of numbers, different numbers for different categories, and a lot of marketing hunches.

Simplify the Problem and the Solution Appears

Looking at one thing too long makes it very difficult to see anything else, when really, sometimes by changing your direction you can see something entirely different. For example, a cylinder from one perspective is a circle, from another it is a rectangle, but in truth, it is neither. So why try and solve a problem that has so many layers going into it when there is only one outcome - qualified leads.

Why not integrate your sales, at least in as far as they actually provide you with some real estimates as to how many online leads it takes to translate to a sale. Is it 100, is it 5? The average gives you a cost/lead a number you can work with and improve.

Start by working backwards, from sale to click - and if you can't get a figure without making some assumptions that you are not comfortable with - then test the assumption first. If you cannot determine if the value is in PPC or banner ads, or assess there real relationship without making an assumption that cannot be justified. Justify it! Test the outcome by turning off the PPC or Banner ads like any A/B strategy. What was the outcome? Now reverse it? What was the outcome? Can you make now make an assumption you are comfortable with?

Not comfortable with turning things off to test the outcome? Let me ask you a question then... how comfortable are you with going forward the way you have been?

It takes time, but eventually you can derive a real value for every part of your sponsored campaigns. You may even be able to reverse engineer some dynamic reports from your analytics to save you next time. The best part, you can start coming up with a strategy that lets you allocate different proportions of banners, PPC, contextual matching, etc to get even better returns - constantly testing, and constantly developing. Just remember too, the difference between play-doh and a souffle is proportions.

In addition, always keep in the forefront that you need to always define what is your absolute key KPI in the first place - that is your starting point - and any improvement to that metric is where your real value is found.

Will Google's Custom Search Effect Sposnored Campaigns?

2006-10-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Google announced yet another tool (it is almost a full time job staying abreast of all of these new tools). With Google Custom Search Engine, a new Google feature that lets you create subsets and tailored views of the whole Google SERP , you can evolve your internal search engine (Google Free) for those that haven't done it yet) to look outside of your domain and give your unique visitors a custom view of Search. In other words, you can become a sort of website Castro, and show your users what you think is an entirely relevant search engine results page.

Try: Sponsored B2B, B2B, Analytics, or Usability

When setting the new tool up, you can choose between searching one site or the entire Web - you specify how many (or few) sites get searched. After all, you know you current customer base better than anybody else, especially a mathematical algorythm like Google. (If you don't, you really should.) For example, if your website falls into the B2B marketplace, selling fabrics for uniforms and the like, you can tailor your SERP so that Gap, Levis, and the like don't appear. But you can also make sure that none of your competitors appear in the resulting listings. Why should you current customers know that there is another provider out there?

You can also manipulate the look and feel of the search box, to make it look integrated with the other design elements on your site. If you're not satisfied with the basic offering, Google lets you do quite a bit more customization from the "My search engines" page. This page lists all of the custom search engines you've created with a unique control panel. The control panel offers numerous options for tweaking your search engine. These options are grouped into a menu that includes basics, sites, look and feel, code, collaboration, refinements, make money (integrate with ad sense), advanced (in case you feel like taking it to a code level) and preview.

Google's new service is an outgrowth of the Google Co-Op program started earlier this year - its an interesting tool, but it really doesn't get you any new customers - it may impact bounces to competitors, but I highly doubt that it will cause any major changes in your numbers. After all, how many clients use an internal search bar to look for outside content (all the web box)? However, this little tool will provide you with some key current customer intelligence; namely, what are your clients looking for within your site - maybe outside of your site. But the most important thing you have to do is actually use that information to develop content (you can also use any analytics solution to derive this intelligence from whatever internal search you are using).

Remember though, you can listen to what your customer wants, but if you don't act on it what was the point in ever listening? If anything, this tool allows you to give your customers more of what they are looking for - relevance. Try using the tool to create partnerships with other companies, not competitors, but those that complement your product offerings - and maybe have those companies do the same.

Will this tool effect your sponsored campaign - it should - it should give you necessary information to refine your campaign for the better. It should help you tailor you current content for what customers really want. It should it should be used as a resource for making all things better. Will it be? Well, I suppose, that is up to you.

Other new Google Tools

Adwords has added 2 new report options: The Last Thirty Days (letting you create all reports for the timeline - no different than specifying the dates yourself [only SE fools never consider trends and external impacts on campaign results - an increase is really only an increase if it is above a baseline], but takes the counting your fingers aspect out of the equation) & Graphs (now including graphs for weekly and hourly reports - you don't have to labor in Excel to make them yourself).

Google's Tool

2006-10-23T22:48:00.000-07:00

Last week a good friend of mine wrote a blog about Google's new multivariate testing tool (Website Optimizer) and its possible implications on usability testing. Google's latest tool isn't the be all end all or any type of revolutionary innovation - it is a nice little testing platform that produces some pretty nice reports though. Basically, it takes what we should all be doing at all times, constantly testing and refining our sponsored strategies and campaigns for changes in our target markets, and packages it in a very user friendly platform.

Too many marketers get caught up in the ideology that the prize is in the messaging, or even worse, in the keyword - and spend so much time focused on demographics or behavioral tools to generate the perfect phraseology for driving traffic. Unfortunately, they tap so many resources that they hyper extend themselves before the real work is done.

Clicks are only clicks - they mean nothing really. Ask any traditional brick and mortar storefront how much value he places on the foot traffic out of his front door. Any one of them would trade one hundred look-i-loos for one buyer. But the rub is that you need to attract look-i-loos to land a buyer. However, if you spend too much time worrying about clicks, you wont have enough time to worry about conversions.

Landing pages are where the real money is made. A landing page motivates a sale, through content, messaging, usability, visuals, and other anchor points to resonate with a relationship and emotional connection between a buyer and a seller. (You can call yourself a service, information site, or whatever you want... if you have a website, you are a seller; if you look at a website, you are a buyer.) Usability and Relationship Management determine conversion paths and the perfect landing page - listen to your customer - and this is where Google's tool can be best used.

Website Optimizer will help you reduce some of the reporting time you are already investing in your PPC A/B testing strategies, or translate very well to you actually starting a testing strategy if the lack of available resources has been your reasoning thus far. Either way, it is obvious that in the near future, Landing Pages and identifiable conversion paths will be much more important to the search engines as well - why else create these free tools and focus on relevance with every algorithm upgrade - at least as important as they already are to your clients or to all those potential clients that are increasing your poor bounce rates.

The Best Influencers Go Home

2006-10-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked by Gord Hotchkiss to look into the traffic and search engine share of a few of our B2B clients. He was being interviewed by a financial analyst wanting to collect some information about sponsored campaigns, whether or not there existed a perfect formula for budget allocation across the various engines, and whether or not the dreaded Panama (or highly anticipated depending on how much you like having real search volume numbers instead of Google type ranges) had made any effects as of yet.

Truthfully, it wasn't terribly involved and the insight was limited, but I started to think about the questions being asked a little more than usual - not necessarily because of the answers, but because the questions were being asked.

First of all, I take the firm stance that there never has been, nor will there ever be, a strict and perfect formula for running a sponosored campaign. The customer always has to be at the center of every decision - if you don't know what the opportunities are then your current analytics are the next best thing. What are existent clients using as their search engine of choice; if your client base is primarily being referred through Google, then Google should get your majority share. Starting any sponsored campaign based on your current customer base is not only a safe route, it is often times the best route.

Unfortunately, this is where a lot of B2B marketers stop and fall relatively short. If you start a campaign based entirely on the information you have collected on your current client base, you will never grow, never see an uncharted opportunity, never make any inroads, and in the end, never hit any of your goals. Why? It isn't rocket science that when you give Google 60% of your total budget that it keeps feeding 60% of your total referrals. All things being equal, this is the way it always should be... however, with some of our strongest clients (those that have made the best inroads in usability issues and understanding that a strong sponsored campaign is about integrating and aligning solutions and not running independent solution lines), interesting opportunities have arisen when we have looked deeper into the popularity and daily traffic volumes of their current sponsored campaigns.

What did we find? In a nutshell, B2B influencers go home at some point in the day. I know this information is radical at its root, but believe me (as I write this at midnight), your market may not be at work all the time, but work - its thoughts, issues, needs - is still in their periphery.

The interesting thing is however that at home, some influencers haven't had the in-house tech guru assign their browser preferences. In fact, there home PC has probably been used by the entire family, and more than likely his teenage daughters are setting the default homepage as MySpace or GoogleTube. So what happens, for some odd reason the high converting query-engine match becomes MSN in the evening. Why? Because the IE browser search window uses MSN and sometimes that qualified target can't be bothered to change it at home.

Customers tend to define their own paths and their own schedules - answers and solutions are never predefined. Anlytics should only ever be a starting point, because if you rest on your laurels, there will always be somebody else to take advantage of that opportunity and pass you by.

Conversion Pages and Paths in B2B

2006-10-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Directing only the most qualified leads to sales is often more important than just increasing the number of leads, especially given the high price points on B2B products and solutions, as well as the drawn out sales cycle.

The ideal conversion path in B2B should be no more than 3 clicks, with two follow-up pages; namely, a “thank-you/confirmation” page and an auto-responder email with links for direct contact, questions, timelines, etc. However, on each page it is also absolutely necessary that the next logical and intuitive conversion trigger be highly visible. Given the long sales cycle, the quicker a user can be qualified, the faster that vital offline contact can be made and the relationship reinforced.

Oftentimes, B2B marketers make the mistake that the keyword is the user qualifier, and that there is no difference in intent from a researcher and a buyer that may be using the same search query; hence why there is usually only one conversion trigger and path per landing page. But there is no sure thing when it comes to organic rankings, and you are never certain that a research prospect is going to land on the research landing page when using a broad query. Because of this, maybe traditional "best practices" do not necessarily apply. Instead, why not have multiple highly visible conversion triggers on one landing page, the best ranked landing page. Like an old direction sign on the rural crossroads - help your prospect get to where they are going within your webite and don't put all your faith in the search engines to get them to the right landing page.

Whitepapers to Generate Leads

2006-10-09T13:59:00.000-07:00

White papers that provide clear, concise and accurate information about enterprise technology products and services are tops in the leading sources of information that technology decision makers use to make purchases. When written well, white papers provide important benefits in educating your prospects and building a business case for your solutions. When disseminated to the right people, they are valuable tools to generate highly qualified [and educated] prospects. In addition, white papers provide real business benefits by reinforcing your company’s credibility and demonstrating your role as a thought leader within your market segment.

White papers serve to build mindshare for your brand and your product. To make a positive impact, white papers must be up-to-date, relevant and compelling; use industry lingo, select language that all readers will understand. Also, review your competitor's white papers before writing yours - so the position you choose gives you a competitive advantage.

Writing the white paper is only the first step. Getting key prospects to read it after its written is critical to meeting your business communication objectives.

There are several easy ways to get your white papers to the right audience:

E-Newsletters – Promote your white papers in your own e-newsletter or buy sponsorships in media that allow you to reach your target market
Directories - Syndicate your white papers to technology directories and white paper libraries where you will find a robust network of highly respected web sites that are trafficked by technology buyers
Lead Generation Programs – Subscribe to lead generation programs that allow you to use your white papers as the ‘trojan horse’ to qualify your prospects who are interested to learn about your solutions.
Press Releases - Issue a press release about each white paper.

Ideal Conversion Scenarios

2006-10-06T09:51:00.000-07:00

Ideally, every click to your company would be from a highly qualified lead far enough along in the buying funnel that they were right on the edge of converting; however, because of the long sales cycle associated with B2B products and solutions, it is far more likely that each prospect visits the website multiple times, researching multiple products and solutions, looking for different benefits, pricing, and implementation content before ever actually initiating an offline contact and becoming a qualified lead.

The “trick” would be to somehow match the behavioral intent of every click to a unique landing page with dedicated conversion triggers – where a researcher would land on a page that said “looking for more information”, while a CIO would land on a page that said “have questions about the implementation process” or “cost savings and real ROI from…” However, sometimes a researcher, buyer, manager, and tech use the same keyword when looking for different aspects: for example, “MFT” when looking for product specs, whitepapers, cost/benefit analysis, and implementation strategies.

So what is the solution? Content is key to directing each unique click to the most relevant conversion path. In other words, the universal landing page (unless search engines progress to a level of behavioral targeting that lets you filter a researcher from a purchaser and redirect each click accordingly even though they are using the same exact keyphrase) has to be a “written net” that is equally able to capture all types of behavioral intents. What does this mean, visible conversion triggers leading into intuitive conversion paths. It means understanding who and what your core target market is and is looking for. It means designing a landing page backwards!

When designing that ultimate landing page, work from the need of your target back to a single landing page. If there are three possible final pages (a research conversion page/whitepaper, pricing "learn more", and implementation plan download) work backwards from those pages to a single landing page with clear, although multiple conversion triggers.

A common red herring in B2B is to assume that the query is the only qualifier, and that intent always matches the keyword. In other words, a user looking from a research perspective will type in "MFT whitepaper", but more likely, a user types in "MFT." What you need to do, is be able to capture that long tail and those varied intents in one landing page.

In future posts I will discuss how landing pages can be tailored for multiple intents, and some best practices to qualify prospects within your site, maintain a strong relationship, and lower bounce rates.

Public Relations Online

2006-10-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

The most recent findings from the Pew Internet & American Life tracking surveys and comScore Media Metrix estimates 60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day. Factor this statistic into the global evolution of broadband adoption and the sheer volume of daily global internet users is staggering, nearing half a billion. In addition, the overall global audience for any given product or solution is so vast and geographically diverse, that it is difficult to ensure that the right messaging is always getting delivered; add to that the fact that the internet is a two-way communication device, and the control of perceived reputation and brand identity seems daunting to say the least.

Search has grown beyond the industrial commercial web and is now well integrated with personal publishing, blogs, wikis, user reviews, comments and all kinds of publishing options which makes keeping track of what is being said about a company, product or service more and more of a challenge. Just do a search for Starbucks on Google and look at the 2nd result. For all of the blogs and social networks out there praising different companies and product lines, there are just as many doing the opposite. One’s reputation on the Internet is becoming just as important as, or perhaps even more than, one’s real world reputation. “A great brand can take months, if not years, and millions of dollars to build. It should be the thing you hold most precious. It can be destroyed in hours by a Blogger upset with your company.”

More than ever, reputation management through all online resources is an absolute must for any business – if WOM (word of mouth) can create a business, WOM can infect and spread across the internet like a public relations nightmare, forever impacting sales, leads, and brand perceptions.

There is, however, a difference between online and offline public relations. Basically, online PR involves activities geared towards influencing media, communities and audiences that exist solely on the Internet using online channels. That includes search engines, blogs, news search, forums, discussion threads, social networks and other online communication tools. Brand reputation monitoring and management is also a focus area for online PR.

As with all marketing tactics, a company should really consider the overall marketing strategy and choose the appropriate mix of tactics that will support the execution for a strong and integrated public relations strategy. The mix of SEO, blog marketing, and press release optimization along with the integration with offline marketing/PR tactics can be very powerful.

If a business has news, they should make it easy for the media to find out about that news. Tools include press releases, wire services such as PR Newswire and PRWeb, an online media kit, an optimized blog and a good SEO effort. Whenever a company gets online media coverage, they should be sure to use social bookmark services such as furl.net and del.icio.us to archive them. It’s also a good idea to use a company blog as a way to reach out to other blogs in the same space to encourage coverage of company news.

The most important online PR resource a business can have is a talented PR pro that can research story opportunities and persuasively pitch both online journalists and Bloggers accordingly. Sending out press releases alone is like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks. Software tools can help make things easier, such as blogpulse.com or Google Alerts for brand monitoring, but it is human interpretation that provides the most value. Monitoring how consumers talk about your brand can provide early warning signs for product or service issues as well as promotion opportunities that can be leveraged. However, by and large, developing relationships with online publication editors and Bloggers is also particularly useful, and for that, a dedicated resource is absolutely necessary.

Basically, reputation management (online) is the business of monitoring what the marketplace is saying about your brand. It also means responding to situations before they run out of control. Venues include blogs, discussion threads, forums and social networking sites. A simplistic formula is to allocate a proportion of resources to reputation management in relation to how important your brand is to your overall business. With the explosion of Internet which is now reaching an increasingly immense audience and the flood of information currently available online, a good corporate reputation can also be built and maintained online. More and more people are using internet, search engines in particular, to hunt for "unofficial" opinions and reviews of products and services.

Future Articles and Posts

2006-10-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

Watch for future posts and articles about how to get the greatest return from your sponsored activity in the B2B market.

Sponsored B2B