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Display: A Medium Unsuited To The Message

Posted by under Pay-Per-Click

With the economy in recession, and consumers examining their checking account balances more closely than ever, marketers have followed suit—spelling trouble for online display ads. In the first half of 2009, display accounted for only 34 percent of U.S. online ad spend. Of that, only 38 percent sold with CPM pricing. So the quid pro quo for the majority of online display advertisers has become the accountability and results that click-through and conversion-based pricing delivers. Once the online display gurus stopped ringing their hands, they freed them for typing. Not necessarily better ads, mind you, but defenses of their format and the CPM pricing models that brands treat with growing skepticism. In a curious way, it’s heartening to observe industry insiders remember what they do for a living. When authoring campaigns for highly competitive clients, we often drop the gloves and start swinging. My beer is lite-er, their burger makes you fatter, my phone map is denser, my kid’s computer can beat up your dad’s computer. Online display disciples have embraced this approach lately by suggesting (more or less) that while their format isn’t perfect, it at least doesn’t disqualify itself with embarrassingly low click-through data. Embarrassing? In direct response—TV especially, but online as well—ad buyers at the very least can compare ad spend to direct sales income (a figure that’s inevitably underreported, as it doesn’t include sales through other channels). No sane advertiser will challenge this common sense staple: if you sell more in merchandise than you spend on the advertising, you know that the format is working. Defending the format is trickier for the online display crowd, which seems to theorize weekly against data. So I ask them: where’s the bee? You find business success in numbers, not nicely turned phrases. While a good slogan can work wonders, you still need some numbers to prove that they actually move merchandise. It wasn’t even a generation ago that marketers trumpeted online formats for the strength of their precise measurability. Ten years later, with less favorable CTRs, we learn that numbers were perhaps overrated, and that we don’t really need instant accountability, especially given display’s mighty branding powers. Unfortunately, branding takes time—curiously a bit longer than the length of a budgeted campaign. Still, many crusaders for the online display CPM model parrot numbers when it suits them. They’re happy to challenge direct response models quoting click-through-rates that fall south of .1 percent, and a finding that a mere eight percent of US online users account for 85 percent of all clicks. And they seem positively giddy about comScore’s “ Whither the Click? ” study that claims a 65 percent lift in site visitation in the week following the first exposure to a display campaign, and an “incremental online sales lift” of 27 percent. Exciting and buzzworthy numbers! But if I were considering an online display investment, the worst number is the legion of display defenders who have embraced defeatist reasoning. The argument is that since current online metrics don’t adequately measure what’s important—awareness, positive feelings, and so forth—we should simply trot out different metrics that sound better (even though they too fail to reliably measure impact). The comScore study responds to the assumption that click-based metrics don’t capture the breadth and depth of variables that boost brand awareness and drive purchase decisions. Yet by attributing every sale to the appearance of an online display campaign (a 27 percent online sales lift!), it repeats the oversimplification it presumably counters. Chances are that TV, radio, and billboards played a role in that sales lift as well. Who runs single medium campaigns? From a metrics standpoint, the minute you acknowledge the interplay of dozens of variables, you diminish the importance of any one, including the variable that you want to spotlight. So like PC telling Mac he should “trust me,” too many online display salesmen ask marketing directors not to obsess so much about numbers—seemingly because the product is still struggling to define a reliable case-proving metric. If you’re going to employ a particular ad channel, you should play to its strengths and do it profitably. The internet is lean-forward medium. People click purposefully, focusing so intently on the objects of their search, that they don’t take their eyes off the road. Product-centric websites are a must because consumers actively seek product info online. Nobody seeks out display ads. While ad aversion is problematic for all formats, it’s endemic to online display. And that’s not even factoring in the “multiple invisible iframes” problem on which The Wall Street Journal has reported. In this scam, ad networks deliver code-only “displays” that consumers literally can’t see, but that are nonetheless tallied and billed in CPM accounting. And the ever-popular entreaties for “better creative?” Well, better ads might mask some online display symptoms, but they won’t effect cures. Fact is, some ad formats are inherently inferior for accomplishing certain purposes. I butter my bread with direct response television, but know better than to lecture Pepsico to sell more Mountain Dew by inviting frat boys to call now (even if they packaged Dew in a keg). An equally apparent fact is that the purpose-driven nature of the internet is simply not conducive to awareness by osmosis. Previously published in adotas.com, January 2010 Author of over 175 published articles, Tim Hawthorne is Founder, Chairman and Executive Creative Director of Hawthorne Direct, a full service DRTV and New Media ad agency founded in 1986. Since then Hawthorne has produced or managed over 800 Direct Response TV campaigns for clients such as Apple, Braun, Discover Card, Time-Life, Nissan, Lawn Boy, Nikon, Oreck, Bose, and Heifer International. Tim is a co-founder of the Electronic Retailing Association, has delivered over 100 speeches worldwide and is the author of the definitive DRTV book The Complete Guide to Infomercial Marketing. A cum laude graduate of Harvard, Tim was honored with the prestigious “Lifetime Achievement Award” by the Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) in 2006. Article Source

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Display: A Medium Unsuited To The Message

11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization

Posted by under Pay-Per-Click

Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve been blogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search. The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful: howsociable.com – Social visibility score knowem.com – Profile building tool Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings Google Insights – Keyword demand trends Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking trackur.com – Social media monitoring socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics Below are screen shots of each tool with a more detailed description of how you might use them. HowSociable is a useful tool to quickly gauge the social presence of a particular keyword or brand name. Agencies like TopRank Marketing will use this kind of tool (customized) to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics for social media optimization programs. For each social site polled, you can clickthrough to see specific mentions.  This is a characteristic of more advanced social media monitoring tools, but for those that want a quick glimpse, HowSocialble is easy to use and the price is right, just like these free social media monitoring tools. However, if you want more comprehensive brand search and monitoring, then a paid social media measurement tool is worth the investment. KnowEm is both a free and a paid service that will help you easily and quickly check whether your brand terms or other keywords have been registered as social profiles on a wide variety of social media web sites. Everything from blogging platforms to social news and bookmarking services are included. If you don’t want to complete all those profiles yourself, you can pay knowem to do it for you.  Companies invest a lot in building their brand, so this tool is helpful both for creating off site promotion channels as well as guarding against brand name squatters. Social Media for Firefox is the only browser addon in our list and can be a handy tool to identify upcoming news items that are gaining popularity on certain social news and bookmarking services. A big part of building a more influential user profile is to be a consistent source of submissions for articles that become popular. This addon helps identify articles that are becoming popular on services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon giving you a heads up to submit to other services.  The logic is that if a news item becomes popular on one service it has a good chance of becoming popular on others.  Relevance, timing and focus are key as is patience for this kind of tactic. SEMRush is an interesting tool for identifying the keyword visibility, both organic and PPC, on Google for pretty much any domain name you might be curious about. Your own or competitors for example. A common question for marketers is, “What are my competitors optimizing for?”. This tool helps uncover that insight and in combination with other standard and social keyword research, can be very helpful insight in a social media optimization program. Google Insights for Search is a handy tool to research trends in popularity of various keywords on their own or in combination.  Filters for search type, geographic location, industry or topical category and timeframe allow you to refine some pretty useful information about what’s in demand. Eric Miraglia ’s Inlink Analyzer is a back link analysis tool based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer that not only counts and displays source links to a particular URL, but it also shows if the source links were bookmarked on Delicious and what keyword tags were used. This kind of insight can be quite useful for understanding the relationship between social keywords and link popularity. It would be nice if there was a CSV export option. Majestic SEO is easily one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools available. There is a free version that gives you link acquisition counts over time and if you are a site owner, you can get full reporting for your site once you validate it.  If you use the paid service, you can get the juicy link details on your competition.  This tools is useful for finding high impact links for standard SEO but it’s also useful for finding out which social media sites your site or competitors’ site are getting  the most links from.  Also, which of your own social destinations (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are getting inbound links and from where. Andy Beal’s Trackur service is a very easy to use social media monitoring tool that offers a free version that will satisfy many beginners in the social media optimization space.  Social media monitoring services are keyword based, (queries and negative or exclusionary) and that means some very useful information about how popular certain keyword concepts are on the social web. Of course you can use it to monitor what people are saying about your brand, identify a certain measure of influence and where they’re saying it. But seeing social keyword popularity trends can be quite useful for taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities. SocialMention is a free real time and social search tool that offers an array of search options (just blogs, just forums, just bookmarks or all) and output in the search results. You can get an indication of basic sentiment and the top social keywords associated with your query. As a free service, you don’t setup an account and save your search results, but you can easily download them into a spreadsheet. This is probably one of the most useful, free social search tools online. Bit.ly URL shortening is very handy since they’re included as a default service on Twitter and many other Twitter applications. Bit.ly is rock solid reliable with uptime, which is pretty critical when you’re relying on their URL redirect to send traffic to whatever it is you’re promoting. You can also get basic statistics for each URL that your shorten to show how productive the site is where it was shared.  In today’s succinct social web with Twitter, status updates and micro-content, being able to conserve space with a reliable URL shortener is very helpful. Stats on top of that make this a “go to” URL shortening service. PostRank offers a nice measure of engagement at the individual document level and if you pay attention, you can get that data on any web site in their database, not just your own. You can easily see what content on your competitors blogs are getting popular and where.  If you sign up for the PostRank Analytics service, you can incorporate Google Analytics data with social engagement metrics. These are essential comparisons in a social media optimization program and can help you understand where to plan your time on the social web. This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing tools. What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?

Targeted Traffic – Increase Your Visibility

Posted by BlogPostman under Targeted Traffic

Are you the proud owner of a website or blog that you would like to turn into a source of steady passive income, but you’re struggling to maintain a high volume of traffic to your web page? Many people think that they will be able to launch a website and instantly turn it into a work at home source of income, and they don’t understand when the money doesn’t come flowing in as fast as they wanted.

One of the things that people often fail to realize about developing a website or blog is that you have to spend a considerable amount of time seeking out targeted traffic. While some people might find your site through online search engines or recommendations from friends, what you really need is a way to capture audience members that are already looking for what you’re offering.

There are many ways to go about driving target traffic to your website, and many people are often overwhelmed by the different options that are available. If you are unfamiliar with the world of search engine optimization or web development, you might feel like you want to give up before you’ve even started.

One of the best ways to start driving a high volume of quality page views to your website is to work with a professional service that already has the infrastructure in place to allow you to access the type of audience members that you need to start earning money from your traffic. These services are typically very affordable, and they will save you many frustrated evenings as you try to decide which of the many methods will be best for your site.

Capturing targeted traffic through redirect advertising is one way that many web site owners have found very useful for getting people that are interested in their content or products to click through to their main pages.

Targeted traffic through redirection is accomplished by signing up with a service that has the experience and network connections to send visitors to your site from a variety of different locations. This network of sites agrees to install code on their sites that will automatically redirect visitors to your page when they click on a link that is related to your topic area.

The reason that this kind of traffic redirection is so important for the success of your site is that it will provide you with unique visitors that might never have found your site otherwise.

Are you interested in learning more about how you can capture targeted traffic to make your site more successful? Click here to get started.