The Crossing of Marketing and IT » analytics

PubCon Vegas 2011 Day 3 – Convergence of Online Marketing and Analytics

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:15:45 +0000

This session was moderated by Mark Knowles

Tom Critchlow, Head of Search, Distilled @tomcritchlow

Data is a marketing asset. Not many companies are using data to their advantage. It’s more than just a research tool.
Infographics can be useful for showing data in a meaningful way.
It’s easy to get attracted to a bunch of cool tools. Find the metrics which you care about and apply to your business and watch those.
Also measure things you can control. Find out what you’re doing which works and what doesn’t and make changes as approprite. You can’t change things you can’t control.
Data is difficult to get information from without context. Make changes and test to learn what happens.
Set up custom variables so you can track content on a page as well as the page itself or to measure how many Facebook users visit your site. This will give you actionable ideas.
Don’t forget to include user feedback in your data.

Alan K’necht, Founding Partner, Digital Always Media @aknecht

Instead of calling it “social media” we should call it social marketing, because we’re all marketers.
Fires draw people together, since the days of the caveman. We want to start fires in a more modern way.
You need 3 things to make a fire: Fuel, Heat and Oxygen. These items can be measured. Perhaps not perfectly, but they can be measured.
Our big mistake: measuring head count. How many people follow or like us. Out of context, this is a meaningless number.
Another measurement mistake: Volume of content creation. While more can be good, but is it quality content and are people viewing and engaging?
ROI, engagement, and sharing are better tools to add to other measurements.
Going back to the fire analogy:
- The fuel is the number of fans, followers, etc. You can measure the quality of the fuel to a certain degree. These numbers can tell us how big a fish we are in the pond, and how big the pond is.
- The oxygen consists of those brand advocates. They are influencers who help spread the flames.
- The heat is the content. Don’t measure quantity, measure quality!
Use URL shorteners and tag them with web analytics code so you can track them. This allows you to measure engagement and what gets shared and clicked on.
Create a dashboard showing raw analytics data combined with the data from URL shorteners and other sources to show the big picture.
See if you can correlate increases in sales or store traffic (with physical locations) with upticks in web traffic and buzz.
Just because you have a bigger fire, it doesn’t necessarily mean increase in revenue. Remember how much people were talking about BP during the spill crisis?
Measure attraction. Be careful not to compare you company with others, even competitors. You have to make your campaign work for you.

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Fun With QR Codes

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:46:54 +0000

Back at the beginning of August, I was part of a great discussion over at the Quick ‘n’ Dirty Podcast blog about QR Codes. Kyle Flaherty found a great example of how not to use them. In the comments, I mentioned there were some good applications for QR codes. In my last comment, I mentioned an idea which came to me while talking social media with some friends who own a restaurant. The idea was to put a sign up near the cash register or the door reminding/asking/encouraging customers to rate their experience on their favorite location-based or other rating site.

Fast forward to yesterday, and I was talking location-based marketing with the Social Media Breakfast group I belong to. As part of that I made a visual aid which shows the idea I was thinking of back in August:

This is just a quick and plain example. Someone with a bit more graphic styling ability should be able to make it look a little nicer while keeping it simple enough to use.

I’m sure I’m not the first person who thought of this. I wonder if anyone else is using a similar idea and how it works for them. If you have experience with this type of sign in your business, please tell us how it’s working for you in the comments.

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No Cookie Cutters Here

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:54:05 +0000

Last week, Jay Baer posted an article on his Convince & Convert blog which he called “Is Twitter Massively Overrated?” In it, he points to some survey data from Edison Research and Arbitron which shows the usage of different media. The results of that survey are quite interesting.

At the top of the list, for probably the umpteenth year since its invention, was watching TV, followed closely by listening to AM/FM radio. The rest of the list (with the exception of watching on-demand video and listening to satellite radio) are all web-based activities. Particularly telling are the numbers of people who watch online video and YouTube (54% and 49%) and use Facebook (51%). Those are some staggering numbers. Jay’s main point in his article is that Twitter is rather low on the usage scale, coming in at only 8%.

The temptation here is to look at Twitter’s numbers and discount them as a platform for communicating with customers. That may be the wrong choice, though many of us are tempted to go this way when confronted with this type of statistic. It would be a mistake to make a knee-jerk reaction based merely on the number. The reason: there is no one-size-fits-all formula for communicating with your customers.

Jay provided a quote from Tom Webster, author of the Edison study, which I think is the most important takeaway from the article. I quote it again here:

The temptation, I think, will be to see Twitter as smaller, and therefore less important, than Facebook. Certainly, Facebook is the gateway to the masses, since it now reaches the majority. For brands and businesses, however, the differential character of Facebook users and Twitter users means that for some products and companies, Twitter might indeed be the best channel for outreach and customer communications, while for others…it might be terrible. It’s imperative for companies to cut past the hype, do their own research, and be where their users are, not where the noise is.

I couldn’t have put it any better. While Facebook has sheer numbers, Twitter users tend to be more active, more connected and share more. Both are valid platforms for your business, and one may very well be more fruitful for you than the other.

The point is: You have to do research into your customers, your clients, your audience and find out where they are most active. That information will tell you where you need to focus more of your online efforts. If you are running around hoping to attract an audience which isn’t already there, you may in for a long wait. And, you shouldn’t discount a platform merely because your audience isn’t there numerically. Those numbers could change and you’ll be playing “catch up” if you’re not in that space already (think MySpace versus Facebook over the past few years).

The next step is to sit down and work out some goals for your social activity. Goals could be more visits to the web site, more sales leads, more purchases of a product, or what have you. Then, work out ways to measure how you are reaching those goals. Sometimes people will tell you one thing in a poll, but actually do quite another (not that they’re lying, they just don’t realize how much they use one platform over another). Use the statistical measurement to validate your survey and see what’s really going on. That, too, will help you make better decisions.

What say you? What is your opinion on this topic? Please feel free to share in the comments, or jump over to Jay’s post and join in the conversation already taking place there.

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Speed Is Of The Essence

Elmer Boutin — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:47:40 +0000

Back in the day, when I first started building web sites, controlling file sizes and download times were a critical part of the process. This was in the days of dialup. For those of you who grew up in a broadband world you have no idea how unimaginably slow some sites would render. Back then, it was important that image tags specified height and width of images so they could act as placeholders. This allowed the text of the page to download on the visitor’s screen in the right place so they could at least read the text while the images downloaded. And those images had better be small, or else. I remember chiding many clients for trying to put 1MB PDFs or 100K images on their sites.

Today, we take broadband for granted. Download speeds are so fast, that the occasional multi-megabyte PDF doesn’t faze most people. Some of us (yes, including me) have gotten a little lazy when it comes to optimizing images and other files for size. Some of our code is bloated and filled with redundancies. Still, for many of our customers, these things don’t really matter. Or do they?

Ah, But It Does Matter
There are two main reasons why download time really does matter: Consider mobile and SEO.

Mobile Browsing
It’s a given that mobile browsing is becoming a larger and larger share of overall internet usage, and that share will continue to grow as time goes on. Think about your customers using their mobile device to visit your site. If they are running on a 3G connection, depending on their provider they can download at speeds from 350 kilobits to 1.7 megabits per second. Those speeds are under optimal conditions and can be/are often slowed by such factors as weather, network congestion, distance from the tower, tall buildings or trees and a host of other things.

While on average your mobile visitors can expect speeds faster than dialup, are they going to wait patiently while the beautiful 150 kilobyte image on your home page downloads? Chances are they won’t, especially if they are stopped at a red light trying to find your address or phone number.

SEO Considerations
I remember during Search Engine Strategies, San Jose in 2006, Google was already warning that Adsense relevancy scores were going to be tied to download times of the landing pages the ads led to. Since then, they have started using download speed as a signal for organic search results as well. I haven’t heard anyone specifically mention Bing using download speed as a relevancy signal, but I can well imagine if they are not using it now they eventually will.

To illustrate this point, Aaron Shear reported in his presentation at last week’s PubCon South during the Advanced SEO Tactics session, that performance gains alone accounted for a 5% increase in traffic to web sites he monitors because of better placement in SERPs on Google. How fast are your pages downloading? Could a performance gain help your placement in SERPs? It’s certainly something worth considering.

Speedometers
There are a couple tools you can use to check your download speeds. My employer uses Webmetrics as an outside monitor to alert if the web sites go down. Part of their weekly report shows download times for monitored websites from their multitude of monitoring sites along with a comparison to the average of all web sites they measure. This is a paid service, but it might be worth the cost for keeping tabs on downtime and download speeds.

A great free tool is the download speed indicator found inside Google Webmaster Tools. This shows you how long it takes to download your pages, “straight from the horses mouth,” so to speak. Google Webmaster Tools has so many other great features, I highly recommend signing up and using it to help you manage your sites better.

Speeding Things Up
If you find your pages are taking more than 4 seconds to download, there are some things you can consider doing to speed them up:

Check your image sizes. If you have images on your pages larger than, say, 50 kilobytes, consider putting in some smaller images with options to click for a larger version. Making sure text is text and not embedded in images will not only make the images smaller, it will help search engines index your content better.
Consider ditching large Flash movies if you have them. If you have one of those “Please wait while the content loads” things on your home page, your Flash movie is too large. Consider moving the “cool” content to other pages with links to it from the home page.
Use CSS to control the look of your site. This helps eliminate redundant code by taking many style-related tags off each page and refers back to the CSS file, which can be downloaded once and used from the visitor’s local cache.
Watch for code bloat. If you have CSS files and you’re no longer using some parts of it, delete those parts out. Copy and paste unneeded lines into a text file somewhere off the site if you think you might need them again.
Consider moving your images and CSS files into a cloud service with distributed data centers. This can help speed up your downloads because bandwidth for these services is usually higher and multiple locations offer better speeds for visitors because files download closer to them. This isn’t usually a cheap solution, but if you have a large web site it could pay off quite well.

What about you? Have you wrestled with download speeds to improve visitor experience and/or SERP placement? Feel free to share in the comments.

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PubCon South 2011 Day 2

Elmer Boutin — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 22:58:19 +0000

Day 2 of PubCon South 2011 was filled with great sessions filled with excellent information. Here are the highlights of the sessions I attended :

Keynote – Daniel Boberg & Tim Mayer

This keynote session was in a question and answer format. I took some highlights of each of their comments and put them here.

Daniel:

One of the biggest questions you need to answer is, “What is the customer’s intent?” It’s important to mine social media and search information to find out how best to position yourself.
The recent Google change to deal with content farms was a good thing, but they won’t get it right out of the gate. This is a long-term issue, so it’s good that they are working on it.
It’s really all about quality content.
It’s very important for the search engines to get into the community more so they can learn more about what’s going on in the community. It would enhance their quality.
Search engines are big companies now. They have to be accountable to their shareholders as well as customers. This probably influences some of their decisions regarding search quality. The bottom line has to be taken into account.
It’s not in the search engines’ interest to skew rankings based on economics. They need to keep things “pure” in order to keep the government from stepping in.
It’s great that Matt [Cutts] and other representative from the search engines come to conferences. It benefits the whole community.
Search is going to evolve with engines using social signals to enhance search quality. Artificial intelligence is also going to play a role in helping search engines do their job better. There is still a lot of room for improvement and growth. Recommendation engines are going to be a big part of search.

Tim:

It’s very interesting that Google allows Twitter to monetize their real-time search. Google must be getting a lot out of this deal because they don’t outsource this kind of revenue stream. They already use tweets as one of their quality signals. There is a lot of time-sensitive information out there which can greatly enhance search quality. In the end, it’s all about search quality.
Separating good quality content from bad quality content is always going to be a challenge for search engines. If “content farms” are going to succeed, they will need to improve the quality of their content.
It’s interesting that Google put 20 engineers on trying to catch Bing “cheating” instead of focusing on their own search quality. It’s reminiscent of the jokes search engineers used to play on each other gaming different search terms.
There were some things the different search engines work together on such as site maps; however, there is little incentive for them to collaborate on other initiatives.
In search rankings, some win and some lose. You never hear from the ones towards the top, you only hear about complaints from those whose rankings fall. But, there are ten or so good spots to get, work towards that. Regulation won’t solve quality signal problems because it needs to be left to the engineers. It will hamper innovation and quality if the government steps in to regulate this. What would the goal be?
We know that mobile is going to grow. Organic search results are going to play less of a part in search queries where more vertical searches are going to get bigger. Consider Bing’s relationship with Kayak for travel search. This type of thing is going to grow.

Interactive Site Reviews Focus on Social Media – Alison Zarrella, Kate Buck and Krista Neher

Kate: If you have social chicklets on your page which are specifically for a contest, label them clearly. But, if you have some at the bottom they should lead to your social spaces unless they are specifically labeled otherwise.
Alison: If you have an active microsite with specific content, it’s a good idea to set up social spaces for that microsite’s content.
Alison: Remember: you should have a crisis management plan to respond to hard questions or problems left in messages on your social spaces.
Kate: If you run a contest, capture their email and remind them every so often, especially if they are supposed to get votes to win. Make your contest stand out among all the others. Email marketing is not dead.
Alison: Facebook is about interacting with your friends. Keep people engaged. If you can do something on your web site, you can also do it on Facebook (for industries which are highly regulated). If you’re running a contest, don’t push it on your Facebook page every day. If that’s the only thing you talk about people will tune you out. Facebook allows you to share posts with specific geographic areas instead of “Everyone” if you need to segregate your audience that way. Also, make sure your business has a page on Facebook and not a profile. They are two different things.
Kate: If you want people to follow you in social spaces, put your icons above the fold and put a call to action.
Krista: If your starting out, it might be better to skip AdSense ads and go for building a community. Figure out how to monetize later. For a web site about shared interests, consider setting up a Facebook group to foster better discussion. Consider getting some bloggers to do guests posts in order to get more traffic to the site.
Kate: The advantage of a group on Facebook for shared interests is that groups give more notifications than Fan Pages.
Kate: Deal with negative contents and customer service issues directly and fairly. People will see how you respond and public customer service is very powerful if you handle it properly.
Kate: Try to keep the blog within your domain. www.site.com/blog is better than blog.site.com
Alison: Have a good relationship between the people monitoring social spaces and your traditional customer service channels. Take a team approach to answering customer service questions on social.
Kate: If you have an affiliate program, make sure you have some wording in your affiliate agreement about proper logo useage (or non-useage) and how the affiliates are empowered to speak on behalf of the company. Communicate with affiliates to help them not spread misinformation.
Kate: Consider making your default landing page on Facebook as a “tab” which has calls to action to “like” or “follow” or whatever.
Krista: “Nobody cares about your stupid news.” Make your Facebook content compelling by solving problems, telling stories and such. Don’t just use this page as a link to your web site. If you have a product with interesting stories, see if you can get videos or pictures of what customers are doing with your products.
Alison: Ask questions on your Facebook page. Generate conversations and get inforamation about your customers at the same time.
Kate: Helpful tips on how to use your products will greatly enhance your Facebook content and possibly boost your sales by helping customers use your products.

Content and Copywriting & Information Architecture – Moderated by Aaron Shear

Developing And Distributing Content Through Social Media – Alison Zarrella

Use Facebook Applications to automate some of your posting to help lead people to your web sites. Don’t use this too much, though.
Consider including exclusive Facebook content such as coupons, specials or exclusive news or previews.
Croudsource content by encouraging industry new posts and feedback about your stuff. Don’t just sell stuff.
Drive engagement and interaction by asking questions, doing polls and such. The more people interact with your page the higher you rank in Facebook’s search.
FBML is going away this week and you need to swap your content to iframes. Customized applications will help you keep people coming through new content.
Consider picking a “topic of the day” and cross-promote the theme among all of your social places. Don’t just copy and paste, target the mentions based on the specific audience/platform.
Pay attention to your content for keywords for Facebook and other searches.

Content: The Centerpiece of Your Social Media Marketing Stategy – Brian Clark

Think of your web site as the target where you push your social efforts towards. If you’re going to sell, sell off the main web site rather than off the social spaces.
In social media, people want and share content.
People share online because it makes them feel and look good.
The content is the marketing. Content marketing is the now and the future.
1. Authenticity is The Story – you need to speak with an authentic voice. You can’t be too “vanilla” or too “edgy” or you will offend most of your audience.
2. Attention, The Hooks – Make the meaningful content interesting to your audience. Headlines are key because people are looking for reasons not to pay attention to you. Grab them in.
3. Authority – be the Likeable Expert.
4. Action – The conversion. Email is not dead! Look at Groupon’s model. You need t omake money.
5. Acceleration – The Upside. Whatever you call it, build your own property.

Coordinating Content Creation – Dawn Wentzell

Good content is the key to effective SEO …

Access Your Resources – how do you wrangle the assets? Take a look at all content properties. Can they add new ones. What people are available to create content (blog posts, images, videos). Check out The Site Owner’s Guide to SEO for Content Writing by Alan Bleiweiss – $5 and well worth the money.
Make a Plan – create an editorial calendar (or content calendar). Make sure you understand if there are approval chains to take into account whem you make your plans
Get to work!

Site Structure and Information, Create Clear Site Paths – Kristine Schachinger

It’s not just about organizing information, but it’s also User Pathing. Users need to be able to clearly get through the site to find what they want and what you want them to find.
First, figure out the business goals.
Then do keyword research before you start writing content. You have to understand keywords first because people won’t be able to find your stuff. RETROFITTING is always bad news.
Remember: Users are the first concern. What’s best for your users is what’s best for SEO. Don’t treat them separately, though.
Next, write your content outline. This can be painful, but it’s because it needs to be done right. Keep your business goals in mind. Involve your tech, marketing, SEO and site architect (if you have one) in this process.
Next, work on navigation. Don’t make users dig! Help your users understand that they are on the right path to what they are looking for. If they have to hunt around you will lose them. Navigation IS Heirarchy. This establishes your entire website and you user experience as well as your conversion pathing. SPEND YOUR TIME HERE. This is a hard step, but it’s most important.
Now … you can start writing your content. Because you did the other steps first, you won’t have to redo this part.
Your website is not an app. Even mobile websites are not apps. Apps are single or dual focused and web sites have many focuses and purposes.

Search Analytics and Traffic Analysis – Moderated by Joanna Lord

Presentation by Paul Edmondson

We have access to tons of data and information. But what is all the data telling us? We need to understand what the data is telling us.
How do you take action?
1. Inline analytics takes all of the data available to make applications smarter. Think about Priority Inbox in Gmail.
2. The idea is to make applications smarter with little or no user intervention.
3. You can apply this to SEO tools. Tools to help you create better titles based on keyword research.

Search Analytics and Traffic Analysis, Competitive Analytics – Prashant Puri

We’re overloaded with a lot of information and it impacts the way we make decisions. Check out Newsweek article at http://bit.ly/hTDbbn
3 Questions to Ask:
1. How do my competitors rank?
2. How much SEO traffic is my competitor driving? Related to this is: What other opportunities are available to my competitors?
3. Why is my competitor outranking me? If they actually are, of course.
Whatever tool you use to check your competitor information, use another to validate what the tool is telling you.
Check out SEOMoz OpenSiteExplorer: www.opensiteexplorer.org

Search Analytics – Mining For Gold – Alan K’necht

Mine Your Data – no matter what analytics tool you use, you’ll have more data than you’ll know what to do with.
Check your PPC accounts and look for exact phrases that work, your web analytics reports for organic terms, and social media conversions. Look for words your potential customers are using which you may not know about.
Use Google Webmaster Tools to check what queries are being used to find your site. Recommend you check your Google Webmaster Tools pages at least weekly.
Use the data to determine what keywords are relevent to your business and see if you need to adjust your site text to optimize for those words/phrases. You can export this data to Excel and analyze it offline. Sort by impressions and click-through rate by position.
Remember: be aware of what is relavent or not.
Use your analytics to see what page customers go to. Ask whether they are going where you want them to go and what they do when they get there.

The True Cost of Analytics – Nate Griffin

Many people buy enterprise analytics products, set it in and then forget it. Too many web sites are updated and changed and analytics are an afterthought. Analytics needs to be a priority and should be a part of regular site maintenance. It can’t be an afterthought.
Analysts need to train their executives to understand the real value of analytics.
Don’t look at the data to confirm your opinion – look for the truth. Instead of this, tie everything to revenue.
Show everyone that analytics touches web site development, design and marketing teams.

2011 Advanced SEO Tactics – Moderated by Kate Morris

Advanced SEO Tactics – Aaron Shear

Is your web site huge? Like more than 1 million URLs? You cannot optimize one page at a time.You’d need thousands to do it right. You don’t need a gigantic staff to optimize if you do it correctly.
What is Google looking for?
1. Site Performance – performance gains alone can bring a 5% increase in traffic via better search rankings.
2. Check your Google Webmaster Tools site download times graph.
3. Make pages load in < 4 seconds. Set your caching properly for max performance gains.
4. Also, minimize CSS and JavaScript files.
5. Try WPTotalCache for your WordPress blog.
6. Check out the Google Page Speed Tool.
7. URL Structure
8. Site Structure/Taxonomy
9. Meat! Substance!

Log Files Get Their Sexy Back - Ian Laurie

In the SEO world, you have to know how log files works.
Resources: http://bit.ly/logfiles
1. Get a bot list – you need to know the names and IP Addresses of the bots.
2. Get your log files – no excuses
3. Onsite SEO: Match bots to visits. Pull the file lines which are from the bots. Check your crawl allocation
4. Onsite SEO: Look for image problems. Check for 404s
5. Onsite SEO: Check site issues – Look for lots of downloads of files with URL strings.
6. Offsite SEO: Links you have, but don’t – Look for broken links. Look for 404 errors for clicks from outside your domain.
7. Do it! The most advanced SEO isn’t just looking at data, it’s taking action when you find problems.
You really can’t get this data from any other source but your server log files. Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc. won’t show you everything.
You don’t get top rankings because you have a black belt in SEO, it’s because you have a tool belt in SEO.

Rob Garner from iCrossing

Check out bit.ly/22considerations & bit.ly/HotSEOTrends
Remember: SEO is an ongoing process.
Digital publishing is the new marketing …
… and brands and marketers must now be pubishers. “Publishing” is words, thoughts, status, images, feeds, video, applications, conversations, and more.
Publishers must also disseminate information in networks to capture links and external influence.
Link measurement is changing. Link influencing has shifted greatly from webmasters to average users. Think about how easy it is to create links by anyone via social media or blogging.
Tweets count as search signals. “Yes, tweets with links are treated differently in the algorithms, and effectively count as links.” This was confimed by engineers from Google, Bing and OneRiot at SES San Francisco in 2010. Build up your networks and pass links to content the people want to see. The authority of the social users is also taken into consideration.
Passive distibution (like PR relays) aren’t nearly as effective as active distribution (sharing on Twitter or Facebook by others). Passive distribution can become active distribution if the people start passing the information along.
Trust and authority are paramount to success of social links. There is a tsunami of spam out there.
The new “R” in search is “Recency.”
Social Relvancy is common sense in SEO.
Engage with one bird and you might attract the whole flock.

The Panda Update – Eric Enge

Instead of worrying about how this affected content farms, make sure you have quality content.
The Chrome browser Blocklist Extension is giving Google a lot of information about what might be spam. They are probably using this data to validate the Panda update.
Make sure you have quality content and add value to the visitors to your site. If you are doing what everyone else is doing you will get lost in the crowd.
Engagement metrics are growing in importance in search results. This is a big change – this really don’t involve on-page changes.
Kill weak pages or repair them. Either way, put some thought into some quality content.

So, PubCon wraps up for now. The next PubCon will be in Las Vegas in November. Check out their web site and register now.

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Reign In Those Files

Elmer Boutin — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:45:48 +0000

I had an interesting conversation the other day regarding file sizes. The person with whom I was speaking had the opinion that since broadband is so common and download speeds are so much faster, one didn’t really need to worry about image or download file sizes. We were talking particularly over some PDFs which were over 5 MB in size.

While it is true that dial-up is all but gone, there is a whole new class of browser which is likely to outstrip even plugged in broadband in just a few years: mobile. According to many predictions, mobile browsing is set to overtake “traditional PC” browsing sometime in the next couple of years. Gartner, a leading prognosticator of things tech, quoted in this story in MobileMarketingWatch, predicts this will happen in 2013.

While mobile browsing on 3G networks is certainly faster than the old dial-up connections, it’s not as fast as WiFi or wired networks. Speeds will certainly increase as 4G networks become more common, but large downloads still will be an issue even for those on the newer networks.

Another consideration to keep in mind is battery life. It certainly takes more juice to download a 5 MB PDF than a 500 KB one. People will certainly notice if their battery dies faster after visiting your site than if they visit your competitor’s.

There are also search engine optimization considerations to keep in mind. Google very publicly lets us know they take download times into account when figuring out page rank. I’ve not heard that Bing does, but I’m willing to bet they do to at least a certain degree.

So, file size does still matter. It will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. Keep that in mind as you put together your marketing materials for download.

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Are You Analyzin’?

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:10:57 +0000

Sometimes we techie types take for granted that certain things need to be done as a part of our web marketing efforts. Because of that, we sometimes neglect to tell others why we do what we do. Once we convince someone they absolutely need a web site, even if their business is small-ish, they wonder why we want to look at web statistics and see who’s visiting and what they’re doing on the site.

You may be one of those reading this and thinking to yourself, “My web site is small, why do I need to bother analyzing my web traffic?” Read on. I think you’ll be convinced by the time you finish this article.

Even if your web site is a one page starter site, it’s a great idea to start tracking your web traffic now. Sometime in the future you will update your site. Establishing baseline data now can help show if your changes brought in more or less traffic. If your site has more than one page, it would be great to see what your customers view – which parts of the web site are more or less popular. This knowledge can help you better understand what kind of information you might need to add, enhance or delete.

Another good set of information is what kind of browsing capabilities your customers have:

Which web browsers are most popular among your users? If the majority of your customers are using Firefox and Chrome, you might want to avoid using ActiveX controls on your web site since that’s an Internet Explorer-only technology.
Which operating systems are most prevalent with your customers? If you find that 75% of your customers are iPad users, you might want to avoid redoing your site in Adobe’s Flash since the iPad doesn’t support Flash.
What kind of connection to the internet do your visitors have? If most of your customers are still languishing on dialup, you might want to avoid doing a lot of streaming video because that will slow the site down too much for them to be useful.

If you’re going to consider doing any kind of ads on the web (Adsense, banner ads you purchase on sites, etc.) it’s a great idea to track your web referrers (those sites which send you traffic) before you start. As your campaign goes on, you’ll be able to spot rather quickly if you’re getting a traffic bump from your advertising efforts. Later, if when you decide to have a presence on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you’ll be able to easily track what kind of traffic you’re getting from those sites, too.

Every so often I see an email from a web site operator claiming they set up a test ad for a company and would like them to pay to keep the ad going. Invariably, there is a claim they sent hundreds of “qualified buyers” along with their request for payment. A quick check of web site stats will show whether those claims are true or not. (Not one has been true thus far, by the way.)

So, I hope you will set up analytics on your site today. Google Analytics is a good choice because it’s free, easy to implement, and has a lot of great information available in it’s built-in reports. Even if you’re not an analytics geek like some of us, set it up and check it out once a month or so. You’ll be surprised what you can learn.

Check out my Google Analytics Primer series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) for more information on this topic.

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PubCon Masters Group Training

Elmer Boutin — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:00:22 +0000

The PubCon folks offered up some great training in Austin, Texas on July 21st. Some excellent speakers were lined up who presented some excellent search marketing information. There were two tracks offered: “SEO: Organic Search Optimization” and “Social Media Marketing.” Jen and I hung out in the Social Media track and weren’t disappointed. I took away a lot of action points I will use when I get back to the office next week.

Here are some takeaways I got from the presentations. Because there was so much good information, I’ll only give the top ten or so points from each presentation.

Google Social Media Reputation Management – Andy Beal, CEO of Trackur and coauthor of Radically Transparent

Don’t wait for a crisis before you start working reputation management. An ounce of prevention works well to head off problems before they begin.
Use your .org domain to highlight your charity work, use .net for other info. Use branded domains and subdomains. All this helps generate positive web pages.
Make sure you grab your branded URL on Facebook (need to have at least 25 people “like” it first).
LinkedIn is good for individual reputation management. It’s great to get as many employees as you can to sign up and list themselves as employees to help the company’s profile.
Twitter works well, but make sure you engage. Every so often retweet nice mentions others make for you.
Use Flickr and YouTube to host images and videos. Fill out the profile pages, use good descriptions for media using keywords. Embed the videos in your site instead of hosting them yourself to get double juice for reputation building.
Use Wetpaint.com to create your own wiki pages instead of trying to play in Wikipedia. You control the pages here, on Wikipedia anyone can edit the story of your brand.
Set up an account on AssociatedContent.com and try to get some articles written. The profile alone can be worth the effort for reputation building.
GetSatisfaction.com is a legitmate site to set up a help desk/question answering page which can help with good links, good indexing AND customer service.
Consider asking customers/partners to set up profile pages on their sites. Ask for YourDomain.com/yourname and offer to provide the content.
Consider sponsoring conferences and other events – especially those which have sponsor profile pages on their web sites. Speaker profiles help quite a bit, too.

Twitter & Facebook Optimization – Dan Zarrella

If you’re not familiar with Dan’s work, I highly recommend you follow his blog. He is doing some great research into how social media tools work and how people use them.

Twitter

Put a bio in your Twitter profile. You will get more followers. Use the 160 characters to your advantage. Make sure you also add a link to your web site/blog and a picture.
Don’t follow too many more people than follow you. Take your time building a network. (Remember: Crock pot vs. microwave)
Statistics seem to show 22 tweets per day on average is the max before people might think it’s too much and unfollow you. Of course, quality is better than quantity.
“We” or “us” tweeters show to have more followers than “I” or “me” tweeters.
If you put a bit.ly link in your web browser address bar with the plus sign at the end, you can see the stats on that link. This is a nice, quick shortcut.
“Link Fatigue” – if there are too many links going by in your Twitter stream, you won’t get as many clicks on your links. It’s best to avoid the crowd and tweet your links later in the week or on the weekends.
About 20% of tweets have links in them. Over 50% of retweets have links in them.
Bit.ly shortened URLs are retweeted far more often than other URL shortened links.
Retweets contain “rarer” words. Don’t say the same thing that others are saying.
News tends to get retweeted more often than “small talk.”

Facebook

In order to learn how your customers use Facebook, ask them. Set up a survey, learn how they use it, and market to them that way.
Use quantcast.com to get demographic data on your web site.
If you can get more people to “like” something on facebook, you get more social proof that your content is good.
Articles with “video” in them will get shared more in Facebook than on twitter.
Positivity gets share more than negativity on Facebook.
Simple and plain tend to be more sharable on Facebook.

Targeting Twitter Influentials – Brett Tabke, CEO of PubCon
This was an expanded version of the presentation Brett gave at the SEO Meetup I wrote about in “Location, Black Hats & PubCon” a couple weeks ago.

“Human beings have used every available method to communicate we have ever been offered.” – Unknown

How PubCon Thrived Using Influential Tweeters:
- Prior to 3008, they spent around $65k on PPC ads over four years with zero tracked sales.
- In 2008 spent around $75k on traditional marketing in 2008 with moderate success.
- During the traditional high signup time in 2008 there were no signups, and a small number of people were asking for refunds. This was due to all the bad economic news hitting right about then.
- They did some surveys and found people sign up for conferences based on recommendations by trusted sources. In other words, word of mouth.
- They looked to reach out to people to tweet and retweet to recommend the conference. Spent far less money and had better results
- It’s an excellent case study on social media success.
Promos work great for retweets. Discount codes and coupons are great retweet bait.
Find out when your target is on Twitter and tweet then.
Look for influential tweeters by checking Klout.com.
Track your retweeters and thank them.
Tweet other people’s stuff 15 times for every 1 about your stuff.

Social Media Conversion – Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist

Advertising was designed to simulate work of mouth, when when of mouth was very inefficient. It’s no longer inefficient.
The Not Social Funnel (paid media):
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Action
Earned media (do something well and people will talk about it):
- Use
- Opinion
- Talk
Predictive Metrics, predicts what might happen. Definitive Metrics, Tells what happened. This is measurable
Social networks give people the ability to talk to each other. This is easier to measure than the old-school word of mouth.
Landing pages need to mimic the look of the ad which brought the customer there. Otherwise the people ending up on that page might feel a disconnect and not follow through.
Social Landing Pages: Blogs.
- Educate your readers to increase use.
- Let comments influence opinion
- Gives visitors a way to talk, to join the conversation
- Help pages can be great landing pages for conversion. Think: public customer support
Social is very measurable, but you may have to use a number of tools to measure the different media.
Check out Austin, Texas-based Spredfast for social measuring. Also automates outgoing social traffic. Swix is a free alternative.
Content-oriented social marketing
- Create a piece of content
- Devise a way to measure the effect on the bottom line
- Market each content item as its own product
He gets a high email subscription rate from the link on his SearchEngineLand profile page. This correlates with what Andy said this morning about boosting reputation management via profile page.

Site Clinic & Q&A
There was a lot of great information tossed around during the site clinic and Q&A at the end of the day. Three attendees offered their web sites for scrutiny and all of the speakers looked over their sites and offered some great constructive criticism and tips for improving their sites and social footprint. I was updating this blog as they were talking. Now I need to help Jen work on her Just Keeping Busy site. One change I made was to the permalink structure, option to organize by category name instead month and year. This helps the site’s content age a little better.

More Training in November
There will be a Masters Group Training before the PubCon in Las Vegas on Monday, November 8th. The limited class size and in-depth training make it well worth attending. You can sign up using the banner on the left (Disclaimer: I am a PubCon Affiliate). But, if you’re going to sign up you better act soon because Brett let on that there aren’t many slots left for the Masters Group Training.

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Book Review: “Radically Transparent” by Beal & Strauss

Elmer Boutin — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:30:40 +0000

Andy Beal is an expert in reputation management on the web. His knowledge on the subject is vast, thoughtful and expert. For that reason it is quite appropriate he should co-author a book about (as the subtitle reads) “Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online.” He and Dr. Judy Strauss succeeded quite well with their book, Radically Transparent.

Radically Transparent is divided into three parts:

Understanding Your Online Reputation – which helps you understand how “The Conversation” works – and doesn’t work.
Building Your Radically Transparent Reputation – which offers hints, suggestions, tools and methods for building a good online reputation
Monitoring, Repairing and Planning Your Online Reputation – which offers methods, tools and possible courses of action to take if your online reputation is sullied.

Each section is filled with real life, case study examples, personal experience and best practices to help you understand and work your reputation through various online channels. The instruction contained in the book will give you practical knowledge to help you better understand and use the tools available to tell your story and respond to comments, both good and bad, which you will find on the web.

Although likely not written as a text book (and certainly not dry and boring as text books can sometimes be), Radically Transparent should be a text book for marketing and PR students. It is also an excellent volume to help professionals already in the field to hone their skills to keep up with changing trends in those areas. I highly recommend this book to those looking to learn about or sharpen their online marketing and PR skills.

For a great example of Andy’s work, check out his recent Marketing Pilgrim post “Ten Online Reputation Management Tips BP Can Use Today.”

Radically Transparent by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss. (Amazon Affiliate Link).

Photos courtesy of Andy Beal.

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Online Privacy Stories – Tempest In A Teapot?

Elmer Boutin — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:45:44 +0000

There has been a lot of talk over the past few weeks about the latest privacy issues with Facebook. To be sure, Facebook does have a number of privacy problems, some of which need to be addressed sooner rather than later. Robert Scoble has a very interesting take on those problems. There has also been a lot of speculation about large numbers users seeking to delete their accounts.

My question is: does the average Facebook user really care about all this?

Danny Sullivan wrote a great piece about how one web site which has a page describing one goes about deleting their Facebook account. This particular page has seen a great deal of traffic over the past few weeks – reportedly even more than Facebook’s own page on the same topic. Very interesting, indeed.

Danny tried to find out from Facebook how many users they lost during this time. They refused to supply that number, but pointed out their membership grew by 10 million users over the previous month. Even if all 456-someodd-thousand users who viewed the web page mentioned above defected from Facebook, that’s only about 4% of how many users Facebook gained over a similar period. I doubt very much if the leadership at Facebook is really worried about such a small number.

Even amidst Congressional hearings and lots of media coverage, I wonder how much attention the average Facebook user is giving it. I mean, there is a lot of talk among the “geekier” folks I follow, but I wonder how much of this is transferring outside the techie world. It seems to me that the rumors of Facebook charging a subscription fee gets a lot more attention, and a lot more ire, than this.

I similarly wonder about Google’s decision to allow people to opt out of being counted in Google Analytics. There is a lot of talk in the tech world because a great many web sites use Google Analytics to track their web site visitor numbers. Many web administrators and marketers are worried about how much this opt out option will affect the accuracy of their numbers.

While this is a valid concern, I have to wonder how many average web users are going to care about whether they’re being anonymously (more or less) tracked via Google Analytics? Of those, how many are willing to go through the steps of actually opting out? I’m willing to bet it’ll be a small enough number that it won’t affect too many web sites’ statistical analysis.

These stories are certainly worth watching because there is a possibility web marketing efforts could be greatly affected if “average users” decide in droves to dump Facebook and opt out of Google Analytics. For most of us more than just watching, for now, is premature in my opinion.

What say you, agree or disagree. Please let us know in the comments.

photo credit: wka

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