Posts Tagged ‘search marketing’

Know Your Marketing Metrics!

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

I can’t stress enough that, if you are running online marketing campaigns, you have to track them for measuring success.  There is no excuse for any online marketer to not track their campaigns through either paid or free analytic software.  Google Analytics (/www.google.com/analytics)  is a free software that enables any marketer to see how well their Search campaign is going, as well as, other online campaigns.  What’s great about this software is that you can place a simple tracking code, provided by Google Analytics, on your website to see how specific campaigns are converting at your site, how users are interacting with the site, and if you have an e-commerce site, how well sales are converting.  Without knowing how new users and repeat users are interacting with your site, you won’t be able to know how to improve the user experience to increase registrant or sales conversions.

There is a down-side to Google Analytics, it has problems aggregating all of the traffic accurately for unique visitors and visits.  For example, if you are running a Facebook advertising campaign, Google statistically will show less traffic to your site, than what Facebook reports, but hey, what do you expect from a free software.

For a more robust analytic software, try WebTrends.  WebTrends can be customized to your needs and is very granular about its tracking. Keeping in mind, it is a paid software, but if you can afford it, I would highly recommend it. If you are running a Search campaign, you’ll be able to see, down to the keyword, if new registrants or sales can be accounted to those specific keywords.

Yahoo – Google Deal, what does it mean for your Search strategy?

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Now that the Yahoo – Google deal has been done, how does this affect your Search strategy? Is it better or worse? For Yahoo it’s good, for you as the advertiser, it limits your choices on pricing for Search, which is bad.

Now, that Google will be serving their search ads on Yahoo, that limits the amount of advertising choices, which ultimately means that Search pricing for your keywords are going to go up. Also, the advertiser will have to deal with higher online search budgets, since it won’t be offset, by running ads on Yahoo and Google separately. Traditionally Yahoo’s keyword search term pricing has been lower than Google’s, so now that Google will be running the show, there will be no choices to separate the Search campaigns in other platforms for reducing pricing. So, what about MSN?

MSN’s search has been no match for Yahoo or Google in the past, but maybe with this new partnership deal, will step up MSN’s effort to be a real player in Search and as an alternative for online advertisers. We will have to wait and see.

Build Your Own Email List, Don’t Buy

Monday, June 9th, 2008

Email marketing is considered the #1 way to market on the Internet, but what does that mean to you, if you don’t have a database of users yet? How do you build an email list to market your services?  Should you buy a list from one of those online services?  Don’t even think about it.  I know it’s tempting to buy a list and it is the easy way out, especially, if you are just launching a site and don’t have any customers, but don’t build your email list this way.  This is a common mistake of Entrepreneurs and less experienced Online Marketers to buy lists and to send bulk email to the list, hoping that users will click on your email or newsletter.  This is definitely the way to get ‘black-listed’ on the top mail servers. Think about how much you hate getting email from companies or people that you don’t know.  So, how do you build your email list?

The best way to build your email list is to run targeted marketing promotions that require people to offer their emails to you. Also, try running online Search marketing, Cost per Lead, Cost Per Acquisition campaigns or try offline Event Marketing programs.  It will take time to build the list, but once you do, you will have a database of users that want to hear from you and will be more receptive to your marketing offers.

The last thing you ever want to do is to market to people who never requested your information, so don’t do it. Take the time, build your list and you will have an effective email marketing campaign.

Google is Darth Vader. So, where is Luke?

Monday, May 5th, 2008

 

Once upon a time, a long time ago, Google offered an advertising service to all types of advertisers that could advertise cheaply and effectively to reach their target markets. Advertisers could spend less than $100 per day and find quality traffic reaching their sites.

Well, as I mentioned, that was a long time ago. Now, the “Little Advertiser”, the guy that I consider to have advertising budgets that are below $5,000 per month, are having a hard time competing with advertisers with larger advertising budgets, due to Google’s attempts to “bring better quality traffic by raising the minimum cpcs to as high as $1, $5, $15, and $20 per click.” Well, how does that bring better quality traffic you ask?

The idea is, if an advertiser really values a specific keyword, they will pay anything for that keyword and thus drive out advertisers that are not willing or “can afford” that premium keyword, which gives the advertiser who bought the keyword an advantage to getting better traffic and better placement in Sponsored Advertising positions. But, the advertiser that has most likely bought this keyword has to have a larger budget than everyone else, which discourages the Little Advertiser from bidding on the keyword, thus knocking them out of the bid and creating a service that is meant only for advertisers with big budgets.

Google has forgotten that their ‘idea’ does not work for a new advertiser with a low or tight budget, since the new advertiser hasn’t had a chance to test and optimize their keywords to know which works best for them in driving quality traffic. For example, If I only have a starting budget of $500 and the cpc for my keyword is $10, then I will only get 50 clicks to my site and as you will learn, not all clicks reach our homepages and only a small percentage will convert, before being optimized correctly, hopefully. 50 clicks is not enough data to figure out which keywords worked the best. The Little Advertiser will not last long in spending money with Google or not even attempt to spend money at all, due to the high costs and little return. In essence, the Google that had created the fair, “ever good” online ad service for everyone that had created them, no longer exists. Google in its attempts to bring more money to itself, which let’s admit we are Americans so there is nothing wrong about that, but has destroyed what was so great about them…the democratization of buying online ad media.

So, what happened to that not evil Google that we all loved? They joined the dark forces of the high-price spending advertising world in order to get their marketing capitalization up. Let’s face it, the days of cheap advertising on Google is over and the ever good Google has become Darth Vader.

So, is there a Luke Skywalker out there that will save the Little Advertiser? I think so, like everything else in the Internet world, you just have to wait for the next ‘big thing’ and I believe it will be a new advertising network that will be cost-effective and driving quality traffic for an affordable price…and hopefully, without the click fraud. So hey Luke Skywalker, hurry up and launch!